Psy's Gangnam Style Passes Bieber's Baby for Record
By wchung | 17 Mar, 2026

Big Night: Psy becomes the biggest internet sensation of all time as the US holiday season opens.

Psy poses with Jay Leno, Natasha Leggero and Bradley Cooper on Leno's Thanksgiving show on November 22, 2012.

Early on Saturday morning Psy’s original Gangnam Style music video had amassed 805,670,000 views to overtake Justin Bieber’s “Baby” to become the most viewed YouTube video of all time.

For the past two weeks “Gangnam Style”, originally posted on July 15, had been logging over 15 million views per day thanks to a string of recent high-profile appearances, including Jay Leno Live on Thanksgiving night. Bieber’s “Baby”, posted in December 2009, had been adding about 1.7 million views a day, partly on media publicity on the impending loss of its record to “Gangnam Style”.

“Gangnam Style”, which has won the Best Video award at the European Music Awards and the New Media Award at the American Music Awards last Sunday, has also been nominated for the People’s Choice 2013 new media award. During the past two months Psy’s Kpop rap hit, powered by the music video’s rousing hiphop-style horse-riding dance, has been hovering at or near the top of the Billboard Hot 100, the Top Digital Hits, the Social 50 and various other charts.

Psy and Bieber are both signed to Scooter Bruan’s Schoolboy records. Psy has revealed that Bieber will be featured in his next single, which has a 50-50 mix of English and Korean lyrics and is tentatively set to be released in early 2013. That will be the first single featuring a collaboration of artists behind the current Nos. 1 and 2 most popular YouTube videos.

Psy’s most recent publicity coup was a performance on the Thanksgiving edition of Jay Leno Live in front of a studio audience comprised entirely of US servicemen. The soldiers clapped and danced in enthusiastic unison to Psy’s performance. Responding to their energy, Psy bounded out into the audience and singled out two male and one female soldier for brief dance duets, apparently doing his part to add new life to the US-S. Korea military alliance.

Psy has enjoyed an impressive run of publicity during the past two weeks thanks to performances and awards at the European Music Awards and last Sunday’s American Music Awards, as well as a rousing duet-cum-dance-battle with Madonna at her New York concert last week. Psy is also scheduled to perform at CCTV’s Lunar New Year show in early February which is expected to command a Chinese audience of 880 million.