Against the (relatively) low engagement for Ed Sheeran’s YouTube Shorts posts, the platform is very keen to trumpet the success of ‘Flowers’ by Miley Cyrus here.
The track is already one of the blockbuster singles of the year with 909m plays on Spotify so far and 384m views on YouTube of the official video.
It has now been used in over 690k creations on YouTube Shorts. There are a lot of clips with views in the hundreds of thousands, but there are also a good number with views in the millions, notably two separate videos that have each had 46m views.
One of those 46m-views clips shows makeup artist Kat Longoria peeling off a face mask as the track plays while the other 46m-views shows magician Wian turning a paper flower into a real rose and handing it to a girl in Starbucks.
It would appear that, as with TikTok, influencers outside of music who use music in their posts are the real accelerant here.
The lyrics (“I can buy myself flowers / Write my name in the sand / Talk to myself for hours / See things you don’t understand”) chimes perfectly with the world of influencers and how they lean on (often platitudinous) lines around self-empowerment. It almost seems precision-tooled for the world of influencer content.
Earnest Pettie, culture and trends insights lead at YouTube Shorts, recently spoke to Tubefilter about the impact of ‘Flowers’, suggesting it was tapping into the social media zeitgeist.
“There’s a much broader trend, especially among young people, towards content that is instructive towards or reflective of self-care,” he said. “We always talk about trends in terms of viral content but it’s really viral ideas that content is floating on top of. Because it’s an idea, it becomes something that a Shorts creator, a live streamer, or a regular long-form video creator working in any category can express in a way that makes sense to them.”
Obviously Columbia/Sony will be throwing its digital marketing weight behind the viral success of it on Shorts (and TikTok), but something that spreads this far and wide is impossible to orchestrate from the off. As always, audiences should never be underestimated and trying to force things to “go viral” is only ever the fast-track to short-term gains and often long-term damage.
