NEW DELHI: Bollywood playback singer Alka Yagnik became the most streamed artist on YouTube in the world last year with 15.3 billion YouTube streams in 2022, and an average of 42 million per day. According to data published by Liberty Games, Alka was the most streamed artist on YouTube, with 17.7 billion streams in 2021 and 16.6 billion in 2020. The Bollywood playback singer took the top spot by overtaking Bad Bunny (Puerto Rico), which received 14.7 billion streams, Taylor Swift, Blackpink and BTS among others.
South Korean superstars BTS received 7.95 billion streams and ranked sixth, while BLACKPINK got 7.29 billion streams and ranked eighth. Taylor Swift was ranked 26th with 4.33 billion, Drake was 50th with 2.9 billion streams and The Weeknd was 13th with 5.7 billion. Udit Narayan is ranked third with 10.6 billion global streams on YouTube, while Arijit Singh ranks fourth with 10.2 billion streams. Kumar Sanu has ranked as the fifth most popular music artist by number of plays on YouTube, just ahead of K-pop sensation BTS. Bhojpuri Khesari singer Lal Yadav followed BTS to rank seventh on the list.
Late playback singer Lata Mangeshkar, who was considered the “Nightingale of India”, took the ninth position, while Shilpi Raj completed the list taking the 10th place. According to data from ChartMasters, nearly 25% of YouTube users are from India.
Speaking of Alka Yagnik, she is one of the most prominent and successful playback singers in Bollywood. In her career spanning over four decades, she has recorded over 8000 songs for films and albums in various Indian languages and has received several accolades including two National Film Awards. Twenty of his tracks feature in the BBC’s list of the forty greatest Bollywood soundtracks of all time.
