The Samuel Bayer-directed music video for Nirvana‘s genre-defining 1991 single “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has just crossed 2 billion plays on YouTube. That song, a hallmark of the grunge era, was certified diamond status (10 million units) by the RIAA in the United States back on December 06 of 2024.
It was largely an immediate hit out the gate however too, first going gold in January of 1992 and then platinum in April of that year. The aforementioned video upload was originally posted on YouTube back on June 16th of 2009.
It previously hit 1 billion views on that service back in December of 2019. The song itself also hit one billion streams on Spotify in June of 2021 and as of press time sits at 2,440,570,579 streams on that digital service provider.
Perhaps one of the lesser known facts about the aforementioned video is its included footage of a pre-fame Fear Factory vocalist Burton C. Bell, who attended the shoot as an extra.
