YouTube celebrates 'Bad Guy' hitting 1 billion views, bringing thousands of Billie Eilish fan covers together for an infinite music video
Nov 23, 2020 – minute read
Billie Eilish: 'Infinite Bad Guy'
Billie Eilish’s chart topping hit, “Bad Guy,” just achieved one billion views on YouTube, her first music video to reach this monumental milestone. Since the song was released in 2019, tens of thousands of Billie Eilish fans from across the globe have uploaded their own versions of “Bad Guy” to YouTube. The covers span nearly every genre, language, and country — ranging from professional to amateur — and from ridiculous to sublime. These covers reveal the very best of the YouTube creator community’s breadth and diversity, and shine a light on Billie’s passionate fans.
To celebrate one of the most-covered songs on YouTube and the billion views milestone, YouTube and Google Creative Lab have built an infinite music video, "Infinite Bad Guy." This unique AI experiment uses machine learning to bring thousands of covers together, seamlessly aligning them in endless combinations, creating a music video that’s different every time you watch it.
Bringing a global fan base together
Infinite Bad Guy brings together music fans and creators from around the world, and celebrates the global reach and impact of music on YouTube. From French autoharpists to Japanese rubber chickens, each of the 15,000 “Bad Guy'' covers couldn’t be more different. With approximately 10.5 million seconds (and counting) of Billie fan love, every play creates a never-before-seen and can-never-be-seen-again combination of videos performed by her talented fans from around the world. Mathematically this means 1.46 x 10^100 years of video combinations. Two people wouldn’t see the same sequence twice, from now through the end of the universe.
To create this experience, Google Creative Lab had to perfectly align the audio from thousands of videos with different tempos, instruments, keys, and styles. Conventional algorithms couldn’t do the trick alone, so we turned to machine learning. For videos that deviated from the original track — like acoustic or a cappella versions — we built a neural network that could predict matches between covers and the original. With this data, we were able to line up all kinds of different covers, and switch seamlessly between them.
To navigate through all of these covers, we used the Google Knowledge Graph to find patterns — identifying the different musical styles, instruments, props, and more — that make up the key moments of each video. This allows fans to explore covers that sound or look alike, or sample a little bit of everything.
In combining all of these elements and more, Infinite Bad Guy was brought to life.
How to play 'Infinite Bad Guy'
Fans can experience Infinite Bad Guy at billie.withyoutube.com. It starts with Billie Eilish’s original music video. Within seconds, you can start exploring covers. Use the scrolling hashtags to discover different instruments, genres and more. Or just hit the autoplay button, sit back, and go for a journey through randomly selected, awe-inspiring covers. Hit pause to see all the videos you’ve watched and get stats about your unique viewing experience. You can click through to any creator’s YouTube channel and support them by hitting subscribe. Without skipping a beat, the song starts all over again with another unique mix of videos.
Celebrating Billie Eilish and music fans across the globe
This year alone, Billie Eilish has earned over 4 billion global views on her Official YouTube Channel, which has amassed over 35 million subscribers, making her amongst the top 15 most-subscribed artists on the platform. “Bad Guy,” her first video to reach 1 billion views, has also appeared on over 50 of YouTube’s Top Songs Charts around the world.
Please join us in celebrating Billie Eilish’s billion-views milestone and thanking the thousands of music fans who made it possible, by playing "Infinite Bad Guy" now. This one-of-a-kind experiment will allow you to see and hear what Billie and 15,000 (and counting) creators from across the globe can make together, only on YouTube.