PewDiePie, move over: most subscribed YouTube channel look set to be Indian music channel T-Series
- T-Series, a Bollywood film production house, posts daily music videos from Indian films and indie-pop artists
- Explosion in Indian mobile phone use is about to propel it past Swedish YouTube sensation’s 83.3 million subscribers
Just days seemingly remain before one internet era ends and new one begins.
For years, a Swedish YouTube star, Felix Kjellberg – better known as PewDiePie – has dominated the platform, running its most subscribed channel and drawing tens of millions of devoted fans.
But every empire must end – and PewDiePie’s downfall is coming thanks to the rapid growth of mobile phone usage among India’s 1.3 billion people. T-Series, a 33-year old Indian music label, has gained subscribers at an astonishing pace for its YouTube channel. Each day it posts several music videos from Bollywood movies and indie-pop artists.
As of Thursday the gap between its subscribers and PewDiePie’s subscribers on YouTube had narrowed to under 124,000. Video marketing companies like Tubular Labs say T-Series is “on course to surpass” PewDiePie’s 84.3 million-plus subscribers within days.
T-Series is already number one on another metric – the most-watched YouTube channel. Its videos have 60 billion – that is billion, with a “b” – views. To put it in perspective: that figure is more than three times the number of views on Justin Bieber or Katy Perry’s YouTube channel.