[ Watch all the videos mentioned in this post ▶️ ]

Ten years ago today, Justin Bieber’s What Do You Mean? was uploaded to YouTube, a glossy, rain- and neon-soaked short by movie director Brad Furman, referencing movies like Out of Sight and The Game and randomly starring John Leguizamo. The video got 12M views in its first day, then debuted at #1 on Billboard’s Hot 100—the first no. 1 hit for the first pop star discovered on YouTube, even though the song hadn’t had gotten much radio play. That was because since February 2013, YouTube views were counted in the Hot 100, pushing everything from Harlem Shake to Wrecking Ball up the charts when they blew up on the site. For Justin Bieber, it was an an amazing turnaround after a few years of being mostly banned from the radio, and kind of great that it happened on the site.

If you look at the other top music videos of 2015, you see video after video with a maxed-out movie vibe—we also had Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again (still the #2 most viewed of all time), The Weeknd’s I Can’t Feel My Face and The Hills, Adele’s Hello, Sia’s Elastic Heart. So many videos that year felt big and high-concept: WTF, Alright, Lean On, Worth It, Hotline Bling, Hey Mama, Stitches… The music industry had started to rebound from a 15 year post-Napster slump and was investing in ambitious videos to push songs up the charts. Most ambitious of them all that year: Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood,” a full-on superhero film from Joseph Kahn with a huge cast of famous actors and performers (including Selena Gomez, the subject of Bieber’s song) and a feature from Kendrick Lamar.

There was one video in YouTube’s top 10 that year that looked completely different than the others—Silentó’s “Watch Me (Whip / Nae Nae),” which cut in videos from a dozen different YouTube channels dancing to the song. Other songs had blown up before thanks to viral dance memes, like Harlem Shake and Gangnam Style, and both the Whip and the Nae Nae dances had already been trending on Vine and YouTube for a year or two. But for this single Silentó collaborated with Madonna-founded startup DanceOn, who worked with 50 dance channels in their network to make dance videos with the song. Those videos got over 250 million views, and the official video went to over 500 million.

You can’t watch the video now and not see TikTok and all the dance challenges coming.

Big budget music videos on YouTube would drive Hot 100 charts for years more—a few more of the most-viewed videos of all time came out in 2016-2018, like Despacito and Shape of You (and… Dame Tu Cosita?), and also videos everyone talked about like Formation, Lemon, Green Light, thank u, next, Malamente, HUMBLE, Sicko Mode, and This is America.

None of the top 25 most-viewed videos of all time, however, are from post 2018, and no video since 2018 is on pace to crack the top 25 anytime in the next 10 years. The kind of gonzo, widescreen videos that were everywhere in 2015 are truly rare now. What did happen in 2018 was TikTok’s merger with Musical.ly, and the app hitting #1 in the app store that year. Spotify also hit nearly 100M subscribers, Apple Music 50M, and YouTube Music relaunched, all signs more people were starting to listen to music on paid mobile apps than a free YouTube browser.

By 2019 songs like Old Town Road were becoming mainstream hits on TikTok before YouTube, thanks to dance challenges and audios. By the time Doja Cat had a music video for Say So on YouTube, it had her doing the dance challenge for the song. Nowadays, it’s more about the shorts fans make than the music videos the artists make, for better or worse.

As for Justin Bieber: for his next music video, Sorry, he abandoned movie sets or even appearing in the video at all, opting for… a dance video, choreographed by Parris Goebel, and made in two days with two New Zealand dance crews on a white background. Uploaded in October 2015, it passed 4 billion views yesterday, is still Bieber’s most-viewed video, and sits comfortably as the #15 most-viewed music video of all time.

Some footnotes I couldn’t fit anywhere in here:

  1. You might have seen the news in June that Silentó was sentenced to 30 years in prison for manslaughter. It’s really sad, and hard not to watch the video now without thinking about that, too.

  2. When I was at YouTube and we began funding original programming on the site, we were well aware of how important dance was, and funded a number of channels in the category, including DanceOn, who did the Watch Me challenge, Jon Chu’s DS2DIO, and Pharrell’s I Am Other (who created the seminal 24 Hours of Happy). Around 2016, when I needed to get approval for our first hourlong premium drama series and biggest investment to date, Step Up, I asked some analysts on the team if we could get an estimate of how many watch hours dance videos had been responsible for in the history of YouTube. The total they came back with (which I’ve long forgotten) was larger than any of us imagined—and was an amazing thing to put in our presentation, along with a number of videos to illustrate the point, like Watch Me and Sorry.

  3. YouTube Time Machine was the name of a brilliant website by my good friend and colleague Justin Johnson that I wish was still around. You can read about it here.