Sia, Sean Paul - Cheap Thrills (Lyrics)
bemu EDM
By the TrendTube editorial team, using YouTube Data API snapshots. Our methodology
Here is perhaps the most surprising trend of the week. Cheap Thrills, Sia's hit released ten years ago, has gathered 5.2 million views and appears in the trending charts of 18 countries. And the most delicious part is that it is not the artist's official channel benefiting, but a simple lyrics video published by a compilation channel. The phenomenon opens a window onto YouTube's underground economy, largely invisible yet colossal. Thousands of channels republish catalog hits in lyrics form, and the algorithm loves this content people leave running in the background like a radio. Retention is excellent, plays chain together, and counters climb without anyone promoting anything. Old hits thus live a permanent second career, relaunched by TikTok sounds, viral playlists or a simple surge of collective nostalgia. A 2016 hit can wake up on a Tuesday in 2026 for no apparent reason and squat eighteen countries, as if time did not count. For rights holders, the business is profitable, these videos are monetized through automatic content identification, every play pays. For chart watchers, the lesson runs deeper than it looks. Trending does not measure novelty, it measures attention, and attention does not care about release dates. Catalogs carry growing weight in worldwide listening, to the point of competing with the day's releases on equal footing. The music industry understood this by buying up catalogs at gold prices in recent years. Our data shows every week that it was right, music's past has never paid the present this well. Another case in these pages illuminates this one. Davuiside's edit marrying Kanye West to a 1980s Russian classic gathered 7.3 million views across 21 countries, and was not published by a rights holder either. Same machinery here, 5.2 million views across 18 countries for a compilation channel. Two of the largest scores in our corpus achieved by channels that own none of what they publish. It is a reality industry analyses rarely mention: a significant share of a catalog's actual audience passes through unofficial reuploads, automatically monetized for the benefit of rights holders. The channel does the distribution work, the owner collects. Nobody planned this economy, and it now weighs as much as some of the major releases covered in these pages.
