Here’s the shocker of the century: ‘Wrecking Ball‘ is number one. After tallying up more than 385 million views since its release on September 9th, Miley Cyrus’ controversial music video has been named as VEVO‘s most viewed entry of the year.
Though there are still a couple of weeks left in the year, there’s no doubt ‘Wrecking Ball’ will not be caught. The only other video to eclipse 300 million views in 2013 is another Miley Track, ‘We Can’t Stop‘; will.i.am and Brittney Spears’ ‘Scream and Shout‘ now has more than 317 million hits, but several million came in 2012, as the video was released November 28th of last year.
‘Wrecking Ball’s domination of the VEVO charts is so singular that even a parody of it–namely, the one created by Steve Kardynal–launched its creator to the top of our YouTube charts and returned the song to the number one spot on Billboard’s Hot 100.
In addition to spots one through three, the rest of the top 10 belonged to big-name traditional media stars, such as Rihanna, P!nk, Katy Perry, and One Direction. This is a slight normalization after 2012, when a little-known Canadian Idol contestant took VEVO’s #1 spot by inviting her chiseled neighbor to ‘Call Me Maybe’. We should also not that Psy‘s videos are not included on VEVO; if they were, both ‘Gangnam Style’ and ‘Gentleman’ would’ve danced their way past Miley.
All of VEVO’s top ten music videos are available in one convenient playlist, though judging from their respective view counts, the average viewer is likely to have already seen most–if not all–of them.
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