Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ Video Pushing Billions Of Views

If celebrities want their songs played most on the radio, they need the most iTunes downloads. If they want to make their way into the hearts of their fans and gain Grammy nominations, they need the most YouTube views.

For Taylor Swift, it’s not hard to work her way into the most-shared YouTube video world. As the youngest ever singer to receive a Grammy award at age 18 in 2008, she is now the recipient of seven Grammys and has been nominated no less than 22 times for the prestigious award.

She’s also one of the best-selling artists in the history of digital music, and the first female (and fourth ever) artist in music history to hit one million in sales in the first week for her songs “Speak Now” in 2010 and “Red” in 2012. Her tour for the latter album broke records in 2012, as this infographic shows.

With such a remarkable history, it’s no wonder Taylor Swift is currently about to break the one billion views mark on YouTube with her “Shake It Off” music video.

As this article posted on Inquistr at the beginning of January points out, “Shake It Off” was the top song of 2014, largely due to the fact that it gave Taylor a “pop queen bee” status she hadn’t quite earned before. Her tween, teen, and adult fans alike couldn’t get enough, meriting her video more than 700 million views by the beginning of this month.

Though this amount is impressive, it still needs another 300 million to reach the one billion mark, which may seem like a lofty goal. But it’s actually not far off when you take into account the fact that the video director, Mark Romanek, has invited all of Swift’s fan’s to join him in his efforts to get the video views to one billion.

On Saturday, April 4, Romanek sent out the tweet, “Dear #swifties, let’s make #shakeitoff the 1st @taylorswift13 video to hit 1 billion views! We can do it! #shakeitoff1billion.”

That final hashtag has simply taken off.

At the time the tweet was posted, the video had reached approximately 704 million views. Since that time, the total has gone up by more than six million, bringing the total today to nearly 711 million.

As a side mission, other fans have taken Romanek’s “dare” to another dimension, starting #OperationBlankSpaceTo1Billion. Currently, Swift’s “Blank Space” video is in the lead, nearing 724 million views, after enjoying another six million view jump over the weekend.

Either video reaching that many views would put one more mark on Swift’s impressive belt of accomplishments.

Which T-Swift video do you think will reach the top first, “Blank Space” or “Shake It Off”? Don’t take your eyes off the charts to watch music history in the making.

[Photo by Theo Wargo/NBC Getty Images]