Getty Image / Christopher Polk
The new Guinness Book of World Records comes out on August 28th in the USA and Canada (September 6 worldwide) and they’ve just released a playlist on Spotify which provides some insight into a few of this year’s records.
Included in this year’s book will be a section titled ‘The Year in Pop’ which details all of the records broken in the past year. On the surface, that sounds boring as shit to me. What do I care about how many retweets K-Pop group get per tweet?
But once I took a look at the Guinness World Records landing page for this Spotify playlist and saw the explanation of each of the records I was stunned by our capacity to be completely consumed by pop music.
I’ve included the records below along with the Spotify playlist but I’d like to point out that the highest-earning band in the world last year was Coldplay. This is unacceptable. Okay, okay, ‘to each, his own’ and all that bullshit. You can enjoy whatever music sounds best to you. But holy shit, Coldplay is awful.
How are they the highest-earning band of the past year with $88.55 million in earnings? How are there THAT MANY people in the world willing to spend money on Coldplay tickets? This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Anyway, here’s the playlist with the accompanying records below:
Most streamed track worldwide (4.6bn) – Despacito (remix) by Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber
Most streamed track on Spotify (1,655,258,694) – Ed Sheeran for Shape of You
Most watched video online in 24 hours (43.2m) – Taylor Swift’s Look What You Made Me Do
Most Latin Grammy Award wins by a female – Shakira won her 11th award at the 18th Annual Latin Grammy Awards, taking home the Best Contemporary Pop Vocal Album for her album, El Dorado
First user to reach 100 million followers on Twitter – Katy Perry
Another thing that has me stumped is how Katy Perry was the first user to reach 100 million followers on Twitter. She’s a huge star. A worldwide celebrity. But you can still name a shit ton of people who are more famous than she is. How was she the first to reach 100 million?
Longest stay on the US Hot Latin Songs chart by a single artist – 22 weeks by J Balvin with Ginza
Most consecutive weeks on the US singles chart (multiple singles) – Drake with a total of 431 weeks – eight years and 88 days – on the Billboard Hot 100
Highest annual earnings for a band (current year) – Coldplay made £68.53 million
Most decades with a Top 20 hit on the US Hot Country Songs chart – Dolly Parton scored her 107th entry with a version of “Jolene” released with acapella quintet, Pentatonix
Most Twitter engagements (average retweets) – BTS registered 330,624 engagements on Twitter, overtaking Harry Styles who had 147,653 engagements on the same date
I shit you not, I had to Google who ‘BTS’ was. They’re a K-Pop group with 16 million followers and holy hell are those followers active. They’re pulling in hundreds of thousands of retweets every time they tweet even if the tweet is just a boring ass selfie.
Most weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 – singles (current year) (87) – Radioactive by Imagine Dragons
Most followers on Instagram (120,135,089 followers) – Selena Gomez
Most followers on Instagram for a music group (17,229,071 followers) – One Direction
Most followers on Twitter for a DJ (22,205,936 followers) – David Guetta
Most viewed music channel on YouTube (group) (9,035,970,802 video views) – Maroon 5
Have you ever met a diehard Maroon 5 fan? Does such a thing even exist? Are there people out there who have seen Maroon 5 fifty times and go to multiple concerts per tour? Do you know someone who listens to Maroon 5 on repeat while driving around in the car? I’ve never met a serious Maroon 5 fan but they must exist if they’ve got the most viewed music channel on YouTube with over 9 BILLION views.
So many of these world records boggle the mind.
You can check out more records and preview the Guinness World Records 2019 Book by checking out their website.