"Coke Studio has carried Pakistan's music."
Coke Studio’s ‘Pasoori’ has made history by becoming the first Pakistan-made music video to cross 1 billion views on YouTube.
The milestone was announced by Coke Studio through an Instagram post celebrating the achievement with fans across the world.
The platform thanked “every single person who pressed play, sang along and made [‘Pasoori’] their own” in a heartfelt message.
The soulful duet featuring Ali Sethi and Shae Gill was released on February 7, 2022 and reached the billion-view mark just shy of four years and seven months.
The achievement is remarkable but hardly surprising given the extraordinary and sustained global appetite the song has commanded.
Coke Studio also shared a reel featuring Sethi and Gill alongside music producers Xulfi and Abdullah Siddiqui to mark the occasion.
‘Pasoori’ was Spotify’s most-streamed Pakistani song in the year of its release and remains both Sethi and Gill’s most-streamed track on the platform.
The song has accumulated almost 405 million streams on Spotify alone, a figure that speaks to its continued and remarkable global relevance.
A press release confirmed the song was the second most searched term in the Songs category on Google in 2022.
It also took the top spot among songs found using the Hum to Search feature, underscoring just how deeply the melody had lodged itself in listeners’ memories worldwide.
Sami Wahid, the general manager for Coca-Cola in the region, spoke about the significance of the milestone for Coke Studio and Pakistani music.
He said: “For nearly two decades, Coke Studio has carried Pakistan’s music, languages and stories to audiences across more than 180 countries.
“‘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.”
His words captured the broader cultural significance of a song that transcended national boundaries and became genuinely universal in its appeal.
Over 90 per cent of the song’s YouTube views came from outside Pakistan, a staggering figure that underlines its extraordinary international reach.
The official music video has been viewed in more than 60 countries, making it one of the most globally distributed pieces of Pakistani cultural output in recent history.
‘Pasoori’ inspired a wave of covers from artists in Pakistan, India and well beyond the boundaries of the subcontinent following its viral release.
The song’s global footprint grew further when it was featured on the soundtrack for Disney’s Ms Marvel, a show that drew heavily from Pakistani culture.
The inclusion was a natural fit given that the show’s protagonist was a Pakistani-American teenager navigating her dual cultural identity.
Coke Studio Africa also produced a remix of the track, with Sethi collaborating with Marwan Moussa and Reekado Banks to create an Afrobeats-infused version.
The cross-continental collaboration further demonstrated how ‘Pasoori’ had become a bridge between Pakistani music and global sounds and sensibilities.
Bollywood attempted its own version of ‘Pasoori’, sung by Arijit Singh.
All in all, ‘Pasoori’ has emerged as one of the defining musical achievements of this decade in South Asia.
