Lady Gaga breaks YouTube record

Lady Gaga has become the first person to gain one billion cumulative views on YouTube.

After two years in the mainstream music business, the artist known for her eccentricities has become the first contributor on the video-sharing site YouTube to reach over a billion views.

According to the internet research site Famecount.com her current number of views at publishing stands at 1,002,734,757.

In recognition of the event Lady Gaga, who is also the most “liked” living person on the social networking giant Facebook, posted to her Twitter page saying: “We reached one billion views on YouTube little monsters”.

Addressing her nearly seven million followers, so called “little monsters”, she added: “If we stick together we can do anything.

“I dub u kings and queens of YouTube!”

Who was going to be the first to reach one billion views was in some doubt as teen pop sensation Justin Bieber edged close to the mark. The 16-year-old, who currently holds the record for views of a single video, has a cumulative of 967 million views.

Dr Sara Wasson, lecturer in popular culture at Edinburgh Napier University, spoke to The Journal:

“This is a fascinating development, in that it really dramatises how consumption of popular culture is gradually changing: rather than just consuming Gaga's and Bieber’s music and attending their gigs, social networking platforms enable fans to connect with each other in a way which would have been more difficult to do before.

“Sure, fans have always connected with each other, but there is no doubt that the sheer ease of use many social networking platforms does facilitate such fan interactions.

“In that way, then, social networking can be seen as enriching fan interactions and experience quite substantially, but there is also perhaps something rather troubling about the exponential growth in particular celebrity followings: although social networking can expose fans to new, independent, lesser-known acts, the cases of Bieber and Gaga also suggest that sometimes it can lead to the opposite happening, i.e. concentrating fan attention on a few ultra-celebrity musicians rather than opening up a diverse range of other musicians to follow.

“In that way, the exponential growth of certain key acts could be seen as impoverishing cultural diversity.”