Giddyap! The official music video for “Old Town Road,” the Western-themed 2019 breakout from Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, has joined YouTube’s Billion Views Club.
The achievement marks both Lil Nas X and Cyrus’ first entry to YouTube’s Billion Views Club. The hip-hop/country hybrid spent a record 26 non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on YouTube’s U.S. Top Songs chart, and set the record for longest consecutive spot at No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 with a 19-week run.
Meanwhile, the 5-minute “official movie” version of “Old Town Road” on YouTube, which features cameos by Chris Rock, Diplo, Vince Staples and Rico Nasty, has nearly 650 million views to date. At the 2020 Grammy Awards, that video took home the trophy for best music video; “Old Town Road” also won for best pop duo/group performance and was nominated for record of the year.
Lil Nas X spent $50 total to record the original “Old Town Road” track in less than an hour at an Atlanta studio before he released it on Dec. 3, 2018 — and it went viral on TikTok. The remix he recorded with Cyrus was released April 5, 2019, and was about to take the top spot on Billboard’s country music chart, before Billboard disqualified it as not containing enough country elements and reclassified it as R&B/hip-hop.
YouTube last month recognized the 10-year anniversary of the first song to break the billion-views barrier: Psy’s “Gangnam Style,” which remains in the top five most-viewed music videos on the platform with 4.5 billion views (and counting). The most-viewed YouTube video ever is toddler smash hit “Baby Shark Dance,” which recently crested 11 billion views.
Lil Nas X celebrated the milestone of “Old Town Road” topping 1 billion YouTube views in a Twitter post, exulting “WE DID IT!” along with a photo of a woman wearing a T-shirt that says, “Old Bitches Winning.”
WE DID IT ! pic.twitter.com/fsY2YVM6lI
— NASARATI (@LilNasX) August 11, 2022