Gangnam Style is the most popular video on YouTube ever… as if I needed to tell you.
The video has been seen 978,000,000 times already. Simple maths tell us that it will probably reach 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) views in a few days.
Interestingly, one of the reasons this song and video are so popular is that PSY, the author, does not try to stop copycats. Thousands, including people here in Mauritius, have done their own interpretations of the song and posted them on YouTube. This has contributed massively towards the buzz for the official video. Naturally, PSY has managed to earn quite a lot of money, mainly by participating in TV commercials in Korea and elsewhere.
Piracy actually has helped sales and made an artist earn his living very very decently. Food for thought.
An update
The video has just reached 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) views on YouTube on 21 December (yeah, the day the world was supposed to end…) Read this very informative article on what Psy raps about and what Gangnam means.
My kids love it… we could also consider it as opensource music… this is one of my favourite:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcLNteez3c4