Swedish Eurodance outfit Rednex have surprisingly smashed a massive record on YouTube, with their 1994 ARIA #8 hit Cotton Eye Joe racking up three billion views in 26 days.
How it happened, exactly? A recent viral event inspired by the song, Gedagedigedagedago, has taken over social media. Video creators have been playing snippets of Cotton Eyed Joe online after Danish singer Razi Irawani shared a video on TikTok with warped song lyrics, gaining 28 million views on the video-sharing platform.
With Cotton Eye Joe gathering three billion views in 26 days (and played throughout the rest of the year, too), 12% of all YouTube viewers and 4% of the world’s population have tuned into the Rednex music video—an absolutely massive achievement. With that new record, Cotton Eye Joe has been watched 28 times more than the top music video on YouTube, 13 times more than the most streamed song on Spotify, and twice as high as the most viewed artist in the world, Alka Yagnik.
In addition to their new YouTube record, here’s another one to consider: Cotton Eye Joe ticked over one billion plays on YouTube in just eight days, surpassing a record set by Adele’s Hello, which reached a billion views in 87 days.
Assisted by YouTube Shorts, Rednex’s current viral takeover has generated 20 million hours of listening time in a 26-day period—equivalent to 700 million traditional views.
“A paradigm shift is happening where we’re asking: how is music success best measured?” Rednex co-founder Pat Reiniz commented in a statement. “This event was created thanks to millions of video creators generating billions of fragmented plays of Rednex’s music, as opposed to the traditional way of listening.
“It will be a challenge for the music industry to reflect these various counts into charts and measurements and even leads to the question of ‘Is the basic use and concept of music itself changing?”
Rednex’s Pervis The Palergator challenged others interested in beating their record, adding: “With 3 billion views in 26 days, we claim a world record! Do you want to beat us? Share stats.”
The record-breaking news about Cotton Eye Joe arrives the same week Rednex released their new party starter, Another Round.
