Despacito Is About To Hit 4 Billion YouTube Views

­­In January Despacito became the second fastest music video in YouTube history to hit one billion views, taking just 97 days to do so. Now it is on track to hit four billion. In January Despacito was part of a succession of new music video consumption records that YouTube and Vevo are setting. YouTube music video views are on the rise, dramatically so, driven both by more users (YouTube announced 1.5 billion signed in active users) and deeper engagement. This is YouTube’s music renaissance and the record labels (their marketing divisions at least) are loving the increased exposure their artists are receiving. At first glance this might not appear to make much sense, given that: a) video streaming growth is outpaced by audio streaming in key markets such as the US and UK, and b) that the whole value gap-grab debate is as far from a resolution as it has ever been. Then, along comes Despacito to drive yet another bulldozer through everything, breaking all the rules again.

The days of one billion streams being considered exceptional are fast disappearing. Despacito added one billion streams in July alone. Just as Spotify spent 2015 and 2016 continually rewriting the rules each quarter, now YouTube is doing the same in 2017. Spotify, of course, is also having a spectacular year but it has established a steadier pace of change, especially in developed markets. Spotify is the new normal (until it’s not again). YouTube had its ‘normal’ but now the acceleration of usage, particularly from Latin America, is making the previously accepted reference points irrelevant.

Moreover, Latin American driven streams might actually intensify the value gap-grab debate. In 2016 YouTube delivered a monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) of $0.07 to the labels. In contrast, Spotify delivered a monthly ad supported user ARPU of $0.34. On paper YouTube has a lot of ground to make up, but things are a little more complex than that. YouTube pays out a share of ad revenue to rights holders. So, if revenues go down the amount it pays goes down by the same rate. Spotify (at risk of simplifying excessively) pays out on a per stream basis. So, if revenues go down, Spotify still pays a certain amount.

This is where Latin America comes in. The local video advertising markets throughout Latin America are much less developed than in the US and, additionally, there is much less advertiser demand. Compared to the US, there are fewer advertisers with less money to spend on consumers, who also spend less money. This means that advertiser demand massively outstrips supply, which suggests that ad prices are lower. So, as Latin American YouTube music consumption grows, effective per stream rates will decline. In our MIDiA’s 2017 Predictions Report, 2016, we predicted that this would happen.

“In 2017, audience behaviour will continue to grow faster than advertiser budgets, meaning that CPMs (and in the case of YouTube, effective per stream rates for music) will fall.”

YouTube and the music industry are unlikely to truly see eye to eye, but value gap or no value gap, we are now at a decision point. The accelerating role of Latin America and other emerging markets in YouTube consumption will see more and more records broken, with bigger and bigger hits made, but the gap between consumption and revenue will widen. So the music industry needs to decide what it really wants YouTube to be for the next few years: promotion or revenue. Trying to make it do both well will most likely result in YouTube doing neither of them properly.

YouTube And Latin America Are Taking Over The World

Unless you have been on Mars for the last couple of days you will have seen the news that Luis Fonsi’s ‘Despacito’ has become the most streamed track in history with 4.6 billion streams. The figure includes a couple of versions of the track (ie the one include a certain Justin Bieber) but is an impressive tally nonetheless. The landmark raises 2 key trends:

1. The role of the Latin American market
2. The role of streaming

Latin Takeover

On the first point, Latin America is becoming a streaming powerhouse. This is a trend we have long anticipated at MIDiA and it is why we have a Latin American analyst (Leo Morel in Brazil) and have been fielding consumer surveys in the region since we launched the company. ‘Despacito’ is not an isolated event. For example, Shakira’s ‘Chantaje’ became the first Latin American Spanish language track to reach 1 billion views earlier this year. But Latin America’s contribution to streaming is uneven. It accounts for 17% of all subscribers globally but 27% of all streaming video users. Indeed, Brazil and Mexico are Vevo’s 2^nd and 3^rd largest markets globally, after only the US. The socio-economic realities of Latin America mean that it will always over index towards free streaming compared to European and North American markets. But the streaming appetite is clear. With such large streaming appetite, expect Latin American audiences to increasingly shape future hits. Once enough Latin American fans get behind a track the snowball effect kicks in: once in Spotify’s global streaming chart it then finds its way into curated playlists and then volumes grow even faster. A similar effect is felt as the momentum kicks YouTube’s and Vevo’s algorithms into gear. But because the region skews towards YouTube and Vevo the regional revenue impact under indexes. Thus we have an emerging dynamic where Latin American audiences create the hits and European and North American audiences pay for them. This is the new normal.

Just as important as the rise of Latin America, is the continued rise of YouTube. Value Gap or no Value Gap, YouTube’s role in breaking and making hits is clear. More so, it is becoming more pronounced. YouTube streaming growth might be slowing in the US but the same does not necessarily apply globally. Indeed, taking the time it takes for YouTube / Vevo music videos to reach 1 billion views we can see that the 2017 hits ‘Despacito’ and ‘Shape Of You’ got there 40% faster than the average for tracks from 2016, 2015 and 2012. Only Adele’s 2015 hit ‘Hello’ got there faster, and that was a highly anticipated event that is a unique case.

 

YouTube added 500 million users between 2012 and 2017. That is no mean feat but nor is it stellar growth. Over the same period Facebook added more than 1 billion users and WhatsApp came from next to zero to 1.2 billion. YouTube is a mature platform and so growth is not just measured in terms of users but also in terms of engagement, especially streams per user. And this is where YouTube really seems to be delivering. A way of relating the growth of 1 billion view music videos to the total user base is dividing the average number of monthly views each video had en route to 1 billion and dividing that by the total number of YouTube users. In 2012 this figure was 0.19, by 2017 it had fallen to 0.17. Thus, for the 1 billion club, more YouTube users are streaming these songs more times. Growth is coming both from audience and activity.

 

There are other mitigating factors. For example it is conceivable that YouTube and Vevo are simply becoming better at creating mega hits, concentrating the audience around big hits. Thus making YouTube/Vevo more of a superstar economy. Vevo’s recommendation algorithms and YouTube’s autoplay feature play a role too, contributing to more streams. The autoplay was negotiated, along with full albums, from the labels as part of YouTube’s Music Key service. A service that never even made it out of beta, but YouTube of course held onto the good parts of that deal. Spotify, that is how you do digital deals!

 

The fact that streaming records are now being broken with such regularity shows that we have arrived at a tipping point. Streaming is transitioning from fast growing digital revenue stream, to the centre of an entirely new business. As impressive as ‘Despacito’s numbers are, get used to these sorts of records being made and broken on a regular basis. And get used to Latin America and YouTube playing an ever bigger role.