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Top 20 most viewed music videos on YouTube in 2026

The most viewed music videos on YouTube span reggaeton, K-pop and a decade-old novelty track about a candy mascot, each ranked with its exact view count

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YouTube's single most-watched video of all time is a cartoon shark, replayed more than 16 billion times, mostly by toddlers who have not yet learned to skip ahead. That fact is true, and it is also beside the point for anyone asking which actual music videos, the kind released by touring artists and major labels, have drawn the largest audiences the platform has ever recorded. The most viewed music videos on YouTube make up their own ranking, separate from the nursery rhymes, cartoon episodes and ad reads that dominate the platform's raw numbers, and that ranking tells a sharper story about two decades of pop culture than any single most-watched title can.

This list draws on YouTube's public view counters, tracked and filtered through industry data trackers that separate commercially released music videos from children's programming and other non-music uploads. What is left is a chart with more range than a glance at old pop charts would suggest. A reggaeton single recorded in Panama in the 1990s shares space with a Hindu devotional hymn released by an Indian record label, a German novelty track about a cartoon gummy bear and a ringtone-era dance track about an animated frog. Some entries, including Despacito and Gangnam Style, briefly held the title of most-viewed video on all of YouTube — only to be overtaken once children's channels began racking up billions of repeat views from viewers too young to skip an ad. Others built their audiences more quietly, over a decade or longer, rather than through one viral spike.

Beyond satisfying curiosity, the ranking is a useful record of how music actually gets consumed and replayed online: what crosses language barriers, what keeps drawing views a decade after release, and what a single meme or dance challenge can do to a song nobody remembered. Every video below has passed 3.9 billion views, a number that, as recently as 2013, no music video anywhere on YouTube had reached. Each also comes with the specific story behind why it caught on, whether that is a choreographer, a World Cup, a copyright lawsuit or a meme nobody saw coming.

Despacito is the most viewed music video on YouTube

Despacito, the 2017 reggaeton single by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, is the most viewed music video on YouTube, with more than 9.1 billion views. Its official video, filmed in the La Perla neighborhood of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, and at the nearby bar La Factoria, was uploaded in January 2017 and spent years as the single most-watched video on the entire platform before nursery-rhyme channels eventually passed it.

Despacito's path to that record ran through the Billboard Hot 100. A remix adding Justin Bieber, released in April 2017, pushed the song from the fringes of the U.S. chart into the top 10 within weeks, and by late May it reached No. 1, becoming the first mostly Spanish-language song to top the Hot 100 since Los del Rio's "Macarena" more than 20 years earlier. The remix also made Bieber the first artist in the chart's history to score new No. 1 songs in consecutive weeks, following his feature on DJ Khaled's "I'm the One." Despacito then matched what was at the time the record for the longest run atop the Hot 100, spending 16 weeks at No. 1, tying Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men's "One Sweet Day."

The video itself helped the song's reach as much as the remix did. Its combination of a colorful hillside setting, a recognizable dembow rhythm and a chorus simple enough to sing along to in any language made it one of the fastest music videos ever to rack up views: it reached 1 billion views faster than almost any video in YouTube's history, trailing only Adele's "Hello." From there it kept climbing at a pace few songs have matched, crossing 3 billion views by August 2017, 4 billion by October, 5 billion by the following April, 6 billion in February 2019 and 7 billion by October 2020.

Despacito's run at the top of YouTube's overall chart, not just its music-video ranking, lasted from August 2017 until November 2020, when it was finally overtaken by Pinkfong's "Baby Shark Dance," a children's video not eligible for this particular list. Despacito remains the highest-viewed video that is unambiguously a music video, released by touring, chart-eligible recording artists rather than a children's entertainment brand. La Perla itself, once known mainly for poverty and crime, has since become a stop on guided tours built entirely around the song's success.

See You Again was written as a tribute to Paul Walker

See You Again, performed by Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth, is the second most viewed music video on YouTube, with more than 7 billion views. Released in April 2015 for the soundtrack of Furious 7, the song was written as a tribute to actor Paul Walker, who died in a car accident in November 2013 while the film was still in production.

Charlie Puth, then a relatively unknown singer-songwriter, wrote the piano melody and chorus after being asked by the studio to submit something for the film's closing tribute. Wiz Khalifa added verses, and the finished track played over a montage in the film's final scene showing Walker's character driving off, separated from the rest of the cast for the first time in the franchise. That emotional context, tied to an actor whose death shocked fans mid-production, gave the song a resonance that outlasted the film's box-office run.

On YouTube, See You Again briefly became the most-viewed video on the entire platform, not just among music videos, overtaking Psy's "Gangnam Style" in July 2017 after Gangnam Style had held the record for nearly five years. See You Again's own reign at the top lasted only about three and a half weeks before Despacito arrived and pushed past it that August. By then the song had already become the second video ever to pass 2 billion views, and it went on to become the fourth video in YouTube's history to cross 5 billion views.

The song also became one of YouTube's most-liked videos of all time, and it gave Puth, previously known mainly as a YouTube cover artist, his breakout mainstream credit as a songwriter and performer. He released his own solo material later that year. Nearly a decade after its release, See You Again is still cited as one of the more emotionally direct tributes ever written for a film franchise, in part because the sentiment behind it, a real actor's death folded into a fictional farewell, was never really about the Fast and Furious franchise's stunts or cars at all.

Shape of You turned Ed Sheeran into a boxer on screen

Shape of You, Ed Sheeran's 2017 single, is the third most viewed music video on YouTube, with more than 6.7 billion views. Rather than filming a straightforward performance clip, Sheeran's team built the video around an unlikely premise: Sheeran as an amateur boxer training for a match, sparring, dating and eventually squaring off against a much larger opponent.

The video, directed by Jason Koenig and shot in Seattle, casts Sheeran alongside actress Jennie Pegouskie as a fellow boxer he meets at the gym. The two spar, share fried chicken at a diner and ride together in a taxi before the relationship falls apart, sending Sheeran back to the gym to train harder for an upcoming bout. In the video's final twist, his opponent turns out to be a retired sumo wrestler, played by Yamamotoyama Ryuta, and Sheeran ends up on the mat, only for Pegouskie to return and deliver a flying kick as the video cuts to black. Koenig had also directed Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's "Can't Hold Us" before working with Sheeran again that same year on the video for "Perfect."

Sheeran has said the song itself almost went to another artist entirely. Writing with Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid, he initially thought the track's rhythm and subject suited Rihanna better, until a lyric referencing Van Morrison convinced him it needed to be his own. The song interpolates a bassline reminiscent of TLC's "No Scrubs," and its writers, including Kandi Burruss and Tameka "Tiny" Cottle, are credited alongside Sheeran, Mac and McDaid as a result.

Shape of You went on to reach No. 1 in 34 countries, one of the widest chart sweeps of any single released that decade, and it was nominated for British Single of the Year and British Video of the Year at the Brit Awards. Its video's comic, unglamorous premise, a pop star willing to play an underdog getting beaten in a boxing ring rather than a smooth romantic lead, helped separate it visually from the wave of shot-in-a-loft performance videos that had defined pop music videos for much of the previous decade.

Axel F revived a 1980s movie theme as a ringtone hit

Axel F, credited to the virtual artist Crazy Frog, is the fourth most viewed music video on YouTube, with more than 6.1 billion views. The track is an electronic dance cover of "Axel F," the instrumental theme Harold Faltermeyer composed for the 1984 film Beverly Hills Cop, reworked around an animated, buzzing amphibian character originally created as a ringtone novelty in the early 2000s.

The character began as a sound effect: a recording of a moped-engine impression shared online in 2003 under the name "The Annoying Thing," before a German ringtone company, Jamba, licensed and animated it as Crazy Frog. Pairing that sound with Faltermeyer's already-familiar movie theme turned it into a single, and the result topped the singles chart in the U.K. and several other European countries in 2005, a rare case of a ringtone-first novelty act crossing into a legitimate chart hit.

The video uploaded to YouTube dates to 2009, well after the character's initial wave of popularity, yet it has continued to accumulate views for more than a decade since, aided by its afterlife as an internet meme and a recurring subject of nostalgia among people who were children when ringtone culture peaked. Unlike most entries on this list, Axel F's audience was not built around a single viral spike or an artist's existing fan base — it grew slowly and steadily, helped by a pattern of repeat viewing more typical of children's content, even though the track itself was originally marketed to teenagers buying ringtones for their phones.

Crazy Frog has periodically resurfaced in internet culture since, including as the subject of memes referencing its abrupt, screeching vocal style, and the character's creators have released other singles in the years since, none of which have approached the reach of Axel F. It remains one of the few tracks on this list built around a cover of an existing film score rather than an original composition, and one of the clearest examples of a novelty act outlasting the specific fad that created it.

Gangnam Style broke YouTube's view counter in 2014

Gangnam Style, the 2012 single by South Korean performer Psy,........

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