Iggy Azalea and Sia have landed on top of a lot of the same lists this year, including ARIA Award wins and Grammy nominations, and now the Australian exports have been named amongst YouTube’s globally most watched artists of 2014.
The title is not entirely an accurate one for Sia, who spent most of 2014 hiding behind paper bags, facing walls and having messages delivered to camera via odd-looking comedians, but her video for Chandelier was named the seventh most viewed clip of the year, with 372,759,690 views at time of writing.
The clip stars the talented 12-year-old actress and dancer Maddie Ziegler wearing a signature Sia wig and was directed by both Sia and Australian filmmaker Daniel Askill.
Iggy Azalea landed the most videos in YouTube’s top 25, thanks to her many collaborations in 2014. Her hit Fancy, featuring Charlie XCX, was listed as 2014’s sixth most watched clip with 388,881,896 views. The video for Ariana Grande’s Problem, featuring Iggy Azalea, came in at number 11 and Azalea’s recent hit Black Widow, featuring Rita Ora, scraped in at number 24.
In fact, according to Fairfax, Iggy Azalea’s Fancy actually topped the Australia-only iteration of the list where Sia’s Chandelier was also bumped up to number six. Globally, the most watched video of 2014 was Katy Perry’s Dark Horse, which won by a landslide garnering over 703 million views since it was uploaded in February.
The video actually came under controversy this year when more than 65,000 people signed a change.org petition stating that the clip, which showed a man wearing the pendant with the Arabic word for God on it being reduced to sand, was offensive and blasphemous. The clip was later edited to remove the pendant.
Also featuring high up on the list were Latin American pop stars Enrique Inglesias, who nabbed both the number two and number 16 spot, as well as Shakira whose videos took both fourth and fifth place. Other mentions include Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off (8), Kiesza’s Hideaway (22) and Sam Smith’s Stay With Me (23).
For a retrospective on the year that was in pop, check out the full list here.
