As of this morning, July 15, PSY’s viral phenom “Gangnam Style” is officially one year old. The video is already the most-viewed video ever on YouTube and was the first clip ever to surpass 1 billion views, currently standing at 1.74 billion, and just last week his official channel on YouTube became fifth on all of YouTube with over 3 billion views. But according to data provided by Google, perhaps more important than PSY’s own larger-than-life profile is the impact that PSY’s viral phenomenon has had on K-Pop’s popularity worldwide.
While global interest in K-Pop has been on the rise for the past few years, data shows that views of Korean artists overall tripled in the year following the release of “Gangnam Style.” Here’s a chart of weekly views on the top K-Pop channels on YouTube, including Psy’s:
The surge in overall K-Pop activity seen in the chart above was also reflected in the Billboard Charts; two weeks following the April 13 spike in views of “Gentleman” the title hit No. 1 on the Billboard Streaming Songs chart, where it was the most streamed song in the U.S. across services like YouTube and Spotify for two weeks straight.
Then, a month later, the overall K-Pop resurgence was reflected in the dethroning of “Thrift Shop” by “Gangnam Style” the week of May 25 (achieving a No. 1 Psy would have likely received when the song was at peak popularity — had the chart incorporated YouTube data at the time.) “Gangnam Style” held this position for six weeks before being dethroned by Miley Cyrus’ “We Can’t Stop” during the July 6 charting week.
According to Google, in the year before “Gangnam Style” (2011) official music videos from K-Pop artists were viewed over 2.2 billion times globally. The year following, that number jumped to over 7 billion views — three times the viewership. In 2011, less than half the viewership on top K-Pop channels was from outside the Asia-Pacific region. Now, the majority of watching takes place outside the region; 91% of viewing over the past year was outside Korea.
In the U.S., where K-Pop had been a largely unknown genre of music, video viewership of top K-Pop artists doubled the year after “Gangnam Style” hit the web.
