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Although Coke Studio’s recent foray into Nu.WAV has not gone down well with fans, it seems everyone can agree that its 2022 hit ‘Pasoori’ is still a certified banger. So much so, in fact, that it has become the first Pakistan-made music video to cross 1 billion views on YouTube.

Coke Studio announced the news on Sunday in an Instagram post thanking “every single person who pressed play, sang along and made [‘Pasoori’] their own”.

The soulful Ali Sethi-Shae Gill duet was released on February 7, 2022 and amassed a billion views just shy of four years and seven months on YouTube. This doesn’t come as a surprise, though; the song has been immensely popular since it first released.

It was Spotify’s most streamed Pakistani song the year it was released and is still both Sethi and Gill’s most-streamed song on the platform, with almost 405 million streams.

A press release said the song was the second most searched term in the Songs category on Google in 2022 and took the top spot among songs found using the Hum to Search feature.

Coke Studio also posted a reel featuring Sethi and Gill alongside music producers Zulfiqar Khan (Xulfi) and Abdullah Siddiqui, thanking fans for helping them reach this milestone.

Sami Wahid, the general manager for Coca Cola in the region, said, “For nearly two decades, Coke Studio has carried Pakistan’s music, languages and stories to audiences across more than 180 countries, and ‘Pasoori’ shows what can happen when a song remains deeply rooted in its identity while connecting across borders. Four years on, audiences around the world continue to discover and return to it. For us, this milestone reflects what Coke Studio has always stood for: creating space for Pakistani artists and ideas to travel globally, and showing the scale at which our culture can resonate.”

‘Pasoori’ was a global sensation from the start, having inspired a number of covers in Pakistan, India and even outside the subcontinent. The song made it onto the soundtrack for Disney’s Ms Marvel — a show that drew heavily from Pakistani culture since its protagonist was a Pakistani-American.

Over 90 per cent of the song’s YouTube views were from outside Pakistan. The official music video has been viewed in over 60 countries.

‘Pasoori’ was also remixed by Coke Studio Africa, with Sethi collaborating with Marwan Moussa and Reekado Banks for a version of the song infused with Nigerian Afrobeats.

As is the case with many popular Pakistani songs, Bollywood also tried to take it over with a version of their own — sung by Arijit Singh no less. That made a lot of people very angry and was widely regarded as a bad move.