What is the most listened to French song in the world? Really not the one you think

This song, although released a decade ago, is the first French-speaking song to reach the milestone of one billion views on YouTube.

With the era of new technologies, some side effects are unpredictable. Have we not, in recent years, seen forgotten music re-emerge from the depths of your CD storage to (re)become global hits? Like the series, we think in particular of Kate Bush and her Running Up That Hill, propelled to the top of the charts by Stranger Things in 2022, or Lady Gaga’s Bloody Mary, published in 2011 and becoming trendy again with the series Wednesday, on Netflix and especially thanks to a TikTok trend.

TikTok, in fact, has accelerated this astonishing phenomenon. It is thanks to this social network, particularly popular among young people, that songs resurface. Recently, the singer Jain took advantage of it with her title Makeba, which makes young people around the world dance, seven years after its release. It is also thanks to TikTok that a French artist has once again emerged, to our greatest surprise.

Nearly ten years after its release, the song Dernier danse, by the artist Indila, has become the most listened to French song in the world, reaching the milestone of one billion views on the YouTube platform. If this title had already enjoyed immense success when it was released in 2014, notably with a platinum certification, it is a second youth that is being offered to it thanks to TikTok.

On the social network, where young users set trends by dancing to excerpts of songs like this one, nearly 250,000 videos using Last Dance are now referenced. And even Britney Spears got into it, that’s saying something.

If the success of Indila’s song Last Dance is surprising, it is mainly because one would have believed that other artists, much more popular, were vying for this place. For comparison, on the second step of the podium for the most listened to French songs on YouTube, we find Aya Nakamura with her hit Djadja, released in 2018, which still has some 935 million views on the platform. For comparison, La vie en rose, probably one of the most famous French songs in the world, only has 25 million views on YouTube.