Luis Fonsi — Despacito ft. Daddy Yankee (2017)

Despacito was released on 12 January 2017 with a video shot in La Perla, a historically working-class neighbourhood of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico. Luis Fonsi had been recording for nearly two decades and Daddy Yankee had carried reggaeton since Gasolina in 2004; neither was a newcomer, and neither was aiming at the Anglophone market. The song is a straightforward reggaeton-pop track sung entirely in Spanish, and the video's imagery is deliberately local rather than exportable.

It moved anyway. Within six months it was the most-streamed song in history across platforms, and on 4 August 2017 it became the first video to pass three billion YouTube views. It went on to be the first to four, five, six and seven billion, holding the most-viewed crown from 2017 until Baby Shark overtook it in November 2020.

The Justin Bieber remix, released in April 2017 with Bieber singing partly in Spanish, is usually credited with the US breakthrough — and it did unlock American Top 40 radio, which had historically refused non-English records outside novelty windows. But the original video's momentum preceded the remix and continued independently of it; the remix has no official video of its own, so all the traffic funnelled back to Fonsi's upload. Despacito spent sixteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, tying the record at the time.

The structural consequence was durable. Latin music's share of US streaming rose steadily afterwards, Spanish-language artists stopped being asked to record English versions as a condition of release, and the pathway Despacito opened was walked by Bad Bunny, J Balvin, Rosalía and Karol G through the following decade. It also marked the point at which YouTube view counts, rather than radio adds, became the primary evidence a label used to argue a song was global.

Growth has since slowed sharply — 4 billion in 2018 to 8.4 billion in 2026 is a 2.1x expansion, the flattest curve in this archive. That is what maturity looks like for a chart record: the discovery wave is over, the catalogue traffic remains, and the video now accumulates views at the steady, unremarkable rate of a permanent standard.