Methodology

Where the numbers come from

Every view, like and comment count, and every publish date, comes from the YouTube Data API v3 (videos.list). Each figure is stored with the UTC time it was fetched. Public reference pages (kworb.net and Wikipedia) were used only to find video IDs. No figures were copied from them.

A job runs every night and takes a new snapshot of every stored video. The site is rebuilt from those snapshots after each run. The current data was fetched between 29 Sep 2026, 01:00 BST and 29 Sep 2026, 12:41 BST.

What counts as a music video

The database stores 8,710 videos. A video counts as music if any of these is true:

YouTube files it under the Music category.
It appears on kworb's curated Most Viewed Music Videos list.
Its title or channel looks like an official music release (VEVO, "Official Video", "M/V" and so on).

Children's songs (nursery rhymes, CoComelon, Pinkfong and similar) and non-music videos (viral clips, trailers, adverts) are stored but left out of every list on this site. That currently excludes 36 videos with over a billion views.

Milestones and tiers

The milestones are 100M, 250M, 500M, 1B, 2B, 3B, 4B and 5B, then every billion up to 10B. A video's tier is the highest milestone it has passed.

Lifetime avg/day is views divided by the video's age in days. It is an average over the whole life of the video, not how fast it is growing now.
Recent views/day is the real change between two snapshots at least 20 hours apart. It is blank until that history exists.
Crossing times for milestones passed while a video was tracked are interpolated between the two snapshots either side, so they are accurate to within one update interval.
Milestones passed before tracking began (28 Sep 2026) have no crossing date. A single snapshot cannot show when that happened.

All view counts on the site are rounded down, so a video is never shown as past a milestone it has not reached.

Coverage and caveats

5,780 music videos with 100M+ views are tracked, plus a watchlist of 2,785 videos between 50M and 100M.
Discovery is broad but not complete. It is weakest for regional catalogues on very large label channels, where only recent uploads and the most-viewed videos were scanned.
Re-uploads, lyric videos and "Topic" audio tracks count as separate videos. Nothing is merged at song level.
Artists are counted by the channel that uploaded the video.
YouTube view counts can freeze, lag, or be revised after spam filtering. The figures here are what YouTube reported at fetch time.

Data downloads and citing

The current figures are free to download as CSV, refreshed with every nightly update:

Billion-view music videos (590 rows)
All tracked music videos with 100M+ views (5,780 rows)

Each row has the video ID, title, channel, views, likes, comments, publish date, tier, next milestone and the UTC time the figures were fetched. A plain-text summary for AI assistants is at /llms.txt, with the full Billion Club list at /llms-full.txt.

View counts change every day, so please cite the date with the figure, for example: "590 music videos have passed one billion views on YouTube (The Billion View Club, data as of 29 September 2026, https://thebillionviewclub-28.web.app)."