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Sweet Child O’ Mine’s Billion Views is a Lesson in YouTube’s Globalization
Guns N Roses are YouTube gold — and popular in emerging markets
What were you doing on Christmas Eve 2009? It’s likely you were spending time with your family, or preparing a turkey for the big day. You may have been excitedly waiting for Santa to arrive down the chimney.
One employee of VEVO, a joint venture between music labels founded in 2008 to take advantage of a growing video sharing platform called YouTube, was doing something different. They were pressing upload on this video, which this week has just crossed one billion lifetime views:
Bassist Duff McKagan has previously said the song — Sweet Child O’ Mine — was not well-loved by the band. Composed in a matter of minutes, Guns N Roses didn’t have high hopes for its success. “It was kinda like a joke because we thought, ‘What is this song? It’s gonna be nothing, it’ll be filler on the record’,” he said.
Of course, they were wrong: it was Guns N Roses’s only Billboard number one, and…
