Guns N’ Roses makes YouTube history as ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ reaches 1 billion views

Guns N’ Roses has just accomplished another first by hitting a YouTube milestone.

Earlier this week, the iconic rock band’s 1987 hit Sweet Child O’ Mine reached one billion views on the streaming platform, making it the only music video from the 1980s to ever do so, according to Variety.

The chart-topping single comes from the band’s first and most successful album, Appetite for Destruction (1987). It is a diamond-certified album in Canada, has gone 18x platinum in the U.S. and has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide. It is the best-selling album in the U.S. to date.

https://twitter.com/gunsnroses/status/1184160818046406657

Guns N’ Roses owns the top spot on YouTube for both an ’80s music video and a ’90s video. The band reached a similar milestone last year when November Rain (1992) surpassed the one-billion mark. The video has garnered more than 1.2 billion views, and is also the only song from its decade ever to do so.

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The nine-minute epic is followed closely on the list of most-viewed ’90s music videos by Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and Zombie by the Cranberries, which have both collected more than 960 million views worldwide.

Whitney Houston takes the No. 4 spot with I Will Always Love You (859 million views) and 4 Non Blondes follow with the What’s Up music video, which has a count of more than 765 million.

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Competing with Sweet Child O’ Mine in the 1980s category is A-ha’s Take On Me (943 million), Girls Just Want to Have Fun by Cyndi Lauper (786 million), the Police’s Every Breath You Take (699 million) and Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean (694 million).

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Though many artists have reached more than a billion views on YouTube over the last few years, Guns N’ Roses is the first rock band from any decade prior to 2000 to do so.