‘Gentleman’ Could Be Psy’s Next Video to Break a Billion Views.
 |
| A chart projecting the possible success of Psy’s “Gentleman” video, if it follows the pace of “Gangnam Style.” That’s a big if. |
The video currently has 92 million views, having been watched 50 million times in just its first 24 hours — a total that vaporized the previous record of 8 million held by fellow Scooter Braun client Justin Bieber for the May 3 release of his video for “Boyfriend.”
 |
| Psy |
But what’s truly remarkable is that if “Gentleman” simply tracks the growth rate of “Gangnam,” it will take over the all-time record in a little over a month, and hurdle 4 billion in 45 days. And in just 75 days, “Gentleman” would project out as hitting 12.6 billion views.
Now, of course, that’s a level of popularity that “Gentleman” can’t possibly attain — it’s more views than YouTube collectively generates each month from all of its videos on a global basis, and “Gentleman’s” momentum already looks like it may be slowing.
But this does highlight the staggering out-of-the-gate success of PSY’s new video, which comes against widespread dismissals from critics and predictions of disappointing results by social media pundits.
Entertainment Weekly knocked the song as a “rehash” that would have sexy ladies “saying ‘buh-bye’ to him.”
The UK’s Guardian dubbed it a “fairly standard-issue pop-dance single” — albeit before the song’s video was available.
Jezebel bluntly called on its readers to “watch the slow death of a pop culture phenomenon.”
CNN’s Jake Tapper blogged that PSY’s concern about being a one-hit wonder “completely founded,” and quoted Rolling Stone associate editor Simon Vozick-Levinson as saying it was “almost impossible to create another hit like ‘Gangam Style.’ It was a freak occurrence. It was just all the right combination of factors and it’s just very, very hard to replicate that.” Tapper also compared PSY to artists with notable novelty hits like Right Said Fred (of 1992’s “I’m Too Sexy”) and Chumbawamba (whose “Tubthumping” briefly ruled the airwaves in August 1997).
And the Reputation Metrics Center of Spain’s Universidad de Navarra, which has been researching ways of algorithmically predicting viral success, decreed outright that “Gentleman” had no chance of matching “Gangnam Style”’s one billion views, based on monitoring its “like ratio” (proportion of likes to dislikes) over the first 24 hours. Based on the fact that it fell from a 91.9% net positive rating to about 80% in that period, Reputation Metrics suggested that the “disgusting” video would fall well short of PSY’s first breakout hit.
But three days later, the video is back up to about 85% net positive. It’s almost guaranteed to crack the list of top 100 most watched YouTube music videos of all time sometime tomorrow, passing current position-holder Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok”’s 126 million views. And many who initially called it repetitive and sophomoric are beginning to begrudgingly own up to enjoying it — either despite its familiarity and juvenile antics, or because of them.
The fact is, PSY has made a number of canny decisions with “Gentleman” that aren’t immediately obvious at first glance.
source link: http://blogs.wsj.com
