There’s no denying the power of bachata, not when numbers are doing the telling.
Dominican superstar Romeo Santos and his dulcet vocals have garnered over 4 billion total YouTube views (some 4,351,032,074), surpassing America’s sweetheart Taylor Swift and pop empress Beyoncé Knowles. Not too shabby for a kid from el barrio, eh?
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“YouTube based its total views on both official and fan-uploaded videos from September 2014 to June 30, 2015,” explains Billboard. “Only videos claimed using ‘Content ID’ get counted. The latter is a system used by copyright owners to identify and manage their content on YouTube. When a fan, for instance, uploads content matching a work an artist owns, the copyright owner gets to decide what happens to that video; options include blocking the video, monetizing on its views by running ads against it, and tracking the video’s viewership stats. Only copyright owners who own exclusive rights to a substantial body of original material that is frequently uploaded by the YouTube user community get a Content ID.”
Santos trumps Swift’s 3.7 billion, Knowles’ 2 billion, Katy Perry’s 2.6 billion, Shakira’s 1.2 billion, plus a number of other mainstream pop artists. The most recent YouTube data also indicates that the 33-year-old’s fanbase views are largely coming in from Colombia (over 700 million views), followed by Mexico, Argentina, Ecuador and the U.S.
Is there anything the Latin heartthrob can’t do?
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