Pasoori has become the first Pakistan-made music video to cross one billion views on YouTube (Dawn Images; Siasat; TechJuice).
The record
Released on 7 February 2022, the song took roughly four years and seven months to reach the milestone.
It is a duet between Ali Sethi and Shae Gill, produced by Zulfiqar Khan (Xulfi) and Abdullah Siddiqui for Coke Studio Pakistan season 14. Xulfi called the milestone an “unbelievable blessing”.
A distinction worth keeping straight: Pasoori passed a billion streams on YouTube Music some time ago, which was reported at the time. Today’s milestone is a billion views of the music video on YouTube — a different count, and the one no Pakistan-made video had reached before.
What it did
Pasoori was Spotify’s most-streamed Pakistani song of 2022. It remains the most-streamed track on the platform for both artists, with close to 405 million combined streams there.
It was covered widely across Pakistan, India and beyond, appeared on the soundtrack of Disney’s Ms Marvel, and was remixed by Coke Studio Africa with Nigerian Afrobeats artists. A Bollywood rendition drew substantial fan objection.
Coke Studio thanked “every single person who pressed play, sang along and made [Pasoori] their own”.
Why it travelled
The song is in Punjabi, with a structure closer to a qawwali call-and-response than to a pop single, and it went to a billion views without a film behind it, without a Bollywood release, and without an English chorus.
That is the part worth noticing. Pakistani music has crossed into the Indian market before, but nearly always through film. Pasoori did it through a corporate-sponsored television music series and a streaming platform — a distribution route that did not exist for the artists who preceded it, and one that does not require permission from an industry Pakistani performers remain effectively barred from.
The context
Pakistani artists still cannot work in Indian film, and cross-border touring has been dormant for years. A billion views is, among other things, a measurement of how much audience exists in spite of that.
