Maroon 5 and Wiz Khalifa's Payphone passes 1 billion YouTube views

Maroon 5 and Wiz Khalifa's "Payphone" has passed one billion views on YouTube, Billboard reported on 18 September.

It is the band's sixth video to join YouTube's Billion Views Club. The milestone lands more than 14 years after the single was first released.

"Payphone" was released in April 2012 via A&M/Octone Records. It was produced by Shellback and Benny Blanco and premiered that year on NBC's The Voice, the television talent show fronted at the time by Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine. The official music video was directed by Samuel Bayer.

The song started fast. It sold 493,000 digital downloads in its opening week, according to Billboard. It debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100, the US singles chart, and at No. 1 on the Digital Songs chart, which ranks the week's best-selling downloads.

Radio picked it up quickly too. "Payphone" spent a second week at No. 1 on Hot 100 Airplay, the radio ranking, with 136 million audience impressions, up 2%. It then spent six weeks peaking at No. 2 on the Hot 100. It finished as the No. 2 Song of the Summer for 2012 on Billboard's seasonal chart.

Sales stayed strong through the first half of that year. "Payphone" was the No. 6 seller at the mid-year point, with 3.08 million copies counted in the SoundScan sales data that fed the charts at the time.

The track appears on Maroon 5's fourth studio album, Overexposed. That album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200, the US albums chart.

YouTube now lists six Maroon 5 videos with more than a billion views each. Alongside "Payphone" are "Sugar," "Memories," "One More Night," "Girls Like You" and "Girls Like You (Volume 2)." A lyric video for "Payphone" was published on YouTube on 16 April 2012, followed by behind-the-scenes footage and the official video in May that year.

What makes this stand out is time. Most singles lose momentum on video pages after a few summers. "Payphone" kept adding views year after year until it crossed ten figures.