Almost 35 years after it was founded T-series is set to break an international record by dethroning YouTube’s biggest star, Pewdiepie. Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg, fondly known by his followers as Pewds is a YouTube celebrity, who has amassed an enormous 65 million subscribers on the popular video streaming site. T-series is close to unseating it.
T-series founded by Gulshan kumar has had quite the success story, since its inception back in the 1980s. It originally started out as a very small company selling pirated copies of Bollywood songs.
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It had its first breakthrough when it produced music for the commercially successful movie, Aashiqui, in 1990. The movie album sold 20 million units, making it the best selling Bollywood album of all time. From there, T-series rapidly became one of the biggest record labels in Bollywood.
T-series, which had only 7.75 million subscribers back in 2015, has seen an enormous growth in viewership and subscriber count. In just 3 years, the channel has gained more than 50 million followers. In comparison, Pewdiepie has only gained 25 million in the same time period.
Pewdiepie’s gaming videos, vlogs, and commentary have been immensely successful and his channel has a total ‘views’ of 18 billion. Now, he has some serious competition to deal with.
More recent reports indicate that T series is gaining roughly 141,000 subscribers daily, whereas Felix Kjellberg is only gaining about 30,000 new subscribers per day. If it continues this way, the Indian company will be the world’s biggest channel by November 2018!
So what’s the reason behind this? How does a channel that posts Bollywood songs and movie clips have more followers than someone who has been consistently creating new and exciting content for his viewers for the past 8 years?
Well, India has a population of more than 1 billion. In the past 2 years, there has been a smartphone and technology boom in the country. Nowadays, almost everyone in the country has access to the internet. T-series has been able to capture the entire Indian market. People enjoy watching new exclusive music videos, dance songs, and even classics and evergreens, and since T-series has the rights to most of these songs and albums, their channel is the only place to watch these videos legally.
Pewdiepie, who is often dubbed the King of YouTube, released a statement this week, jokingly asking his fans to fight back against T-series. “The time has come for us to fight back,” he said, in one of his recent posts. His fans have now taken to twitter, facebook and other platforms, and have bombarded t-series with comments and dislikes. Many consider it to be the greatest internet feud of all time. Of course, it is all in good humor, and there is no malicious intent whatsoever. Fellow YouTuber “MrBeast”, tweeted this on Wednesday.
Our Lord Pewdiepie is under attack, his regime is being questioned. Are we just going to sit back and let him be taken over? NO! We will fight, I’m calling all the kids of the internet, let’s save Pewdiepie before it’s too late. pic.twitter.com/0joBoNrhPI
— MrBeast (@MrBeastYT) August 29, 2018
Although Pewdiepie might soon be defeated by the Indian music giant, both channels are unique and well established in their own rights. Pewdiepie will remain a pop culture icon for his fans, and does not really face any threat from the record label, which has a completely different genre of content and clientele.