What is the most played music video in a single day?
In an age stacked with visual media, it seems at odds with the world now that music was once a purely auditory medium. Between social media, the press, and music videos, we have more physical access to our favourite stars than ever before, adding a whole new dimension to what it means to truly make it big. Particularly on the latter front, the captivating visions caught in a music video can make a song just as iconic as the sound or lyrics of the track alone.
Take Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ or Madonna’s ‘Like a Prayer’, where the all-out blockbuster scale of the videos sent the songs into the land of legend, perhaps more than what they ever could have achieved on their own. In that sense, music videos have become a currency of status in the industry, separating the weak from the chaff in who could easily swap the recording studio for the big screen.
Of course, there also comes with this a different level of more tragic overtures when music videos remain the defining visual legacy for a dearly departed artist. For those who strutted the stage with just as striking looks as their distinguished sound, videos become a vital marker of preserving that star’s place in history amid the scores of music archives once they are no longer with us – and that is none more so true than for the iconic blazing star whose music videos secured his future fate even once the curtains of his life suddenly closed.
Naturally, that would be none other than David Bowie, whose untimely death on January 10th, 2016, not only sent the world into shock but also his classic music videos soaring in views. To that end, although many of Bowie’s videos experienced significant upticks in the days after his passing, the song ‘Lazarus’ takes the crown for having the most played music video in a single day, having been watched more than 11.1 million times that day alone.
How were David Bowie’s music videos watched after his death?
As Bowie’s final ever single from the swan song album Blackstar, ‘Lazarus’ gathered the most attention in the wake of the Starman’s death for the obvious reason that it was, both for the audience and the man himself, a final goodbye. But in this vein, all of Bowie’s back catalogue in the video realm received a surge in mourning, with his views climbing by a stratospheric 5198% on the day of his death – in other words, breaking a record on YouTube for amassing 51million views in a single day.
In doing so, this surpassed the record set by Adele in the previous year, when on the day she released her track ‘Hello’, the rest of her video catalogue also received a collective helping of 36 million views. But nothing could beat Bowie—and proving his transcendental orbital power once and for all, he continued setting the record forevermore, both in life and in death.
Successful music videos may be the visual manifestation of an artist in their prime, but as Bowie’s example demonstrated, it is also ultimately the conveyor of their legacy. As he was leaving the world, the glam rocker was sure to imprint his mark one final time, as much a testament to the sonic omniscience of his life and work as anything he could ever physically achieve because his spirit always lived on.
