Guns N’ Roses Are Biggest ‘80s and ‘90s Band on YouTube
Guns N’ Roses are officially the biggest act of the ‘80s and ‘90s on YouTube, Forbes reported.
Their 1991 video for “November Rain” has now passed one billion views, while 1988’s “Sweet Child O’ Mine” is nearing 700 million.
“The earning power of Guns N’ Roses has been underlined as the band’s reunion tour closes in on $500 million in revenue,” Forbes reported. “‘November Rain’ is the first music video from the 1990s to reach the billion-view milestone, and the first one created before the YouTube era to do so.”
Forbes noted that the clip averaged nearly 560,000 views every day in 2017. "Its continued success shows the growing popularity of catalog songs as an income generator,” it added.
The official version of “November Rain” was published on Guns N’ Roses’ YouTube channel on Dec. 15, 2009, with “Sweet Child O’ Mine” having arrived the previous day. The band's popularity was boosted with the return of guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan to the band's lineup in 2016, marking the first time since the early ‘90s that they had appeared together onstage with frontman Axl Rose.
Guns N' Roses' Not in This Lifetime tour – the title a reference to a comment Rose once made about the chances of a reunion – completes a European leg on July 24, with further dates listed for November. Their debut album, Appetite for Destruction, was just reissued and expanded, including a $999 edition containing more than 80 items and limited to 10,000 copies.