Blackpink’s “Kill This Love” sets new YouTube records, including the biggest Premiere

Blackpink, one of the highest-profile Korean pop groups, is breaking YouTube records with its latest video. A Google spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that “Kill This Love” is the fastest music video to hit 100 million views, having hit that number in less than three days. It is also now YouTube’s most viewed music video debut, racking up 56.7 million in the first 24 hours after it was posted.

Furthermore, “Kill This Love,” the first single and title track of Blackpink’s new EP, is the biggest YouTube Premiere to date, with a peak of 979,000 concurrent views. This surpasses the 829,000 concurrent views racked up during the YouTube Premiere of Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next” in December. YouTube launched Premieres as part of a new suite of creator tools in October. The feature allows them to create a landing page to promote a video ahead of its release and includes a chat feature like live videos, allowing YouTube to compete more directly with Twitch.

“Kill This Love” also hit milestones on iTunes, reaching the number one position in the US store, the first Asian girl group to do so.

Blackpink, a quartet of four women formed by YG Entertainment, one of Korea’s biggest music labels, is one of the most popular K-Pop groups. While it has already gained a massive fan following in Asia (and abroad) since its debut in 2016, Blackpink is now poised to follow BTS as the next K-Pop group to break into the mainstream in Western markets, with its first North American tour starting in Los Angeles later this month. Blackpink has always mixed Korean and English in its lyrics, but “Kill This Love” is notable for being more multilingual than the group’s previous tracks, broadening its potential appeal.