The most viewed YouTube channel in the world is a music label

With over 1.27 billion views each month, Bollywood music label and film studio T-Series is the most-viewed YouTube channel.

For many of you, this isn’t new information. T-Series has been the top destination on YouTube for eight months in a row. In March, it passed the 1bn views milestone, racking up 1.18bn views and averaging a 30% month-on-month growth.

The data is courtesy of online-video industry site Tubefilter, which uses analytics firm OpenSlate to collate its Top 100.

Today Tubefilter released its April instalment of the Top 100 Most Viewed YouTube Channels Worldwide – and there’s another music channel rounding out the Top 5 once more.

Ed Sheeran closed out April with a 28% decrease in views on March – following his 62% growth around the release of ‘Divide’. But he still managed to place 5th, clocking up over 752.4 million views last month and cementing his team’s genius decision to release every song from his album as a YouTube video.

If only the fact that we have two music channels clocking over 1 billion views each month was something to celebrate. The music industry is currently at war with the Google-owned SVOD giant as it continues to hide behind safe-harbour protections and widen what the industry calls the ‘value gap’, where revenues from consumption are not being returned fairly to rights holders.

When Google released a study on YouTube’s knock-on effects for the music market., the IFPI responded with its own statement:

“Google’s latest publicity push once again seeks to distract from the fact that YouTube, essentially the world’s largest on-demand music service, is failing to license music on a fair basis and compensate artists and producers properly by claiming it is not liable for the music it is making available.”

This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network.