Guns N' Roses' 'Sweet Child O' Mine' smashes one billion YouTube views

Guns N’ Roses’ timeless anthem ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ has become the first 1980s music video to smash the one billion YouTube views barrier.

Uploaded to YouTube less than a decade ago on 24th December 2009, ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ passed the one billion views milestone yesterday (15th October) and, at the time of writing, has 1,000,351,885 views.

The music video depicting the band rehearsing in the Mendiola's Ballroom at Huntington Park, California has racked up an average of 590,000 views a day in 2019 and it’s the officially the first music video from the 1980s to enter the YouTube Billion Views Club.

‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’, of course, appeared on Guns N’ Roses’ blockbuster debut album ‘Appetite for Destruction’ in 1987 and was released as a single in the UK almost two years later in May 1989, where it reached number six on the charts.

Back in July 2018, Guns N’ Roses’ epic rock ballad ‘November Rain’ became the first music video from the 1990s to hit one billion views on YouTube.

The lavish nine-minute video, which reportedly cost $1.5million to make back in 1992, was also the first music video from the pre-YouTube era and the 20th Century to reach the one billion milestone. It’s not on 1.2billion views.

In total, Guns N’ Roses have amassed 895million YouTube views in 2019 alone including massive views in countries like the United States (163 million), Brazil (117 million), Mexico (112 million), Argentina (48 million), and Colombia (37 million).

Daily views of their official videos have averaged more than 3.1million.

The most viewed YouTube videos of the 1980s are as follows:

1. Guns N’ Roses ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ (1987) - 1billion views

2. a-ha ‘Take On Me’ (1984) – 943million views

3. Cyndi Lauper ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ (1983) – 786million views

4. The Police ‘Every Breath You Take’ (1983) – 699million views

5. Michael Jackson ‘Billie Jean’ (1983) – 694million views

• Guns N' Roses