D Is for Dance:
10YearsofYouTube:
To mark its 10th anniversary, YouTube has released a playlist of some of the site’s most popular dance videos from the past decade.
Are you ready for an archeological dig of your meanderings among Gangnam-stylers, dubsteppers, flashmobbers and assorted ordinary dudes with a soundtrack? One of the latter helped propel the success of dance on YouTube: Judson Laipply, whose “Evolution of Dance” was once the most-watched video on the site. Strikingly simple and low-tech—just Judson in his jeans, with six minutes of song excerpts—it’s still being watched almost 1,000 hours a day, according to YouTube.
That’s nothing compared with the 40,000 videos a day reportedly uploaded to the site during the peak of the Harlem Shake craze in 2013. That resulted in an estimated 2.3 million clips of bouncy, half-minute routines to the hypnotic beat. In total, YouTube reports, viewers have uploaded more than 24 million dance-related clips over the past 10 years.
In the case of the Harlem Shake, dance was a spectacular engine of success, if you define that by ranking on music charts.