Taylor Swift's "Patient Zero" drew 13,680,832 views on YouTube's global Top Songs chart in the week ending October 8, 2026, down 44.8% from 24,777,513 in its debut week, according to the weekly chart files YouTube publishes. The track fell from ninth to 29th worldwide and lost the No. 1 position in both the United States and Australia to Ella Langley's "Choosin' Texas", a song in its 49th week on the US chart. Shakira and Burna Boy's "Dai Dai" held the global top spot for a 21st chart period with 52,838,019 views, down 7.8% on the previous week. A comparison of the songs chart with YouTube's Top Music Videos chart for the same week shows the official upload linked to each song accounted for a median 63.8% of that song's views, leaving more than a third of consumption on lyric videos, second official uploads and user-made clips.

In Short

Taylor Swift's newest song was watched about half as much on YouTube in its second week as in its first, and a country song that has been around for almost a year took back the top spot in the US. This matters to brands and media buyers because a big debut does not guarantee a big second week, and a lot of song viewing happens away from the official music video. The data suggests that buying around a single official upload captures only part of where a song's audience actually watches.

What the files contain

YouTube makes its music charts available as downloadable CSV files on its YouTube Charts site. Nineteen files dated October 8, 2026 form the basis of this analysis: weekly Top Songs charts for the global ranking and 15 national markets (Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States), plus the global Top Artists, global Top Music Videos and global Top Shorts Songs charts.

Each songs file holds 100 rows with eight columns: Rank, Previous Rank, Track Name, Artist Names, Periods on Chart, Views, Growth and YouTube URL. The artists file drops the track and URL columns. The Shorts file has only 50 rows and carries no view counts at all, because YouTube ranks that list by the number of Shorts created with a song rather than by how often those Shorts were watched.

The files do not state when the tracking week starts. PPC Land's analysis of these exports has used a Friday-to-Thursday window, which would make this the week of October 2 to October 8. The Views column is a weekly figure, not a lifetime total: "Dai Dai" shows 52,838,019 views in the October 8 file, while the same song recorded 57,331,821 in the file for the week ending October 1, as PPC Land reported on October 6.

The Growth column needs care. It carries a percent sign, yet its values behave as decimal fractions. "Dai Dai" shows -0.08%, and the raw totals imply a 7.8% fall. A pairwise test across all 16 songs charts confirms the reading: when each song's previous-week views are reconstructed by treating Growth as a fraction, the implied previous ranking matches the Previous Rank column in 99.6% to 99.8% of song pairs, depending on the market. Treated as a true percentage, the match falls to between 75.6% and 92.1%. PPC Land flagged the same formatting problem in September, when LISA's "SaWaDiKa" showed -0.79% after a fall of about 79%. All percentage changes in this article are calculated from raw view totals, or from Growth converted on that basis.

Two further limits apply. YouTube changed what counts as a view on August 24, 2026, when long-form videos and live streams moved to the rule Shorts already used, under which a view registers as soon as a video begins to play. The chart files contain no note about that change, so comparisons between this week and the summer cross an unmarked methodological break. And the 15 national files are not the whole world: YouTube publishes charts for 61 countries or regions, and markets that feed the global list heavily, such as Mexico, Turkey and Pakistan, are absent from this set.

Patient Zero's second week

"Patient Zero" was released on September 25, 2026 and debuted at No. 9 globally in the week ending October 1, with No. 1 positions in the United States and Australia. One week later the picture is different in every market where it appears.

In the US, its views dropped from 7,084,018 to 3,415,353, a fall of 51.8%, and it slid from first to fourth. In Australia it fell from first to third with 357,286 views. The UK placing went from second to fifth, Germany from third to 15th and the Netherlands from seventh to 13th. In Spain and France the track fell 60 and 58 places respectively, to 89th and 87th, the largest decline on either chart. The song still appears in nine of the 15 national markets.

Swift's position on the global Top Artists chart shifted too. She dropped from seventh to 17th with 126,380,007 views across her catalogue, a decline of about 30% on the previous week by the file's own Growth figure. No other artist in the top 50 lost as much ground.

There is one detail in the files that complicates the comparison. The YouTube URL attached to "Patient Zero" on the songs chart points to a video that appears on the Top Music Videos chart for the first time this week, at No. 25 with 7,911,656 views and a Periods on Chart value of 1. The official video therefore entered the videos chart in the same week that the song's total views fell by almost half. The files do not show which uploads carried the song's debut-week audience.

Second-week declines of this size are not new to the YouTube charts. PPC Land documented BLACKPINK's "GO", which fell from No. 1 to No. 20 in its second week in March, and "SaWaDiKa", which debuted at No. 1 with 154,951,658 views in the week ending September 10 and lost about 79% of that total a week later. This week "SaWaDiKa" sits at No. 17 with 15,541,762 views, down another 34% on the previous week.

A 49-week-old song at No. 1 in the US

The new US leader did not get there by growing. "Choosin' Texas" by Ella Langley drew 5,611,670 views, down about 11% on the previous week, yet climbed from second to first because the songs around it fell faster. "Dai Dai" moved up from fourth to second in the US with 4,006,039 views, and KAROL G's "BbY WOW", with Judeline and rusowsky, rose from fifth to third.

The US songs chart recorded "Choosin' Texas" in its 49th period, and the Australian chart, where the song also returned to No. 1, recorded its 40th. It is not in the global top 100, whose cut-off this week was 6,996,029 views. That gap illustrates how far a domestic leader can sit from the global list. The US No. 1 drew roughly a tenth of the views of the global No. 1.

Dai Dai's 21st week

"Dai Dai" remains the global No. 1 for a 21st chart period, but its base of national No. 1s has narrowed again. A week earlier it led five of the 15 national charts: Germany, France, the UK, the Netherlands and Portugal. In the October 8 files it leads only Germany, with 1,629,050 views, and the Netherlands, with 390,664.

It lost the other three to three different songs. In France, "Fille à Papa" by Vacra and La Rvfleuze moved from second to first with 2,326,226 views. In the UK, "COS OF YOU" by Morrisson debuted at No. 1 with 1,454,445 views. Portugal's chart also has a debut at the top: "Isaltino" by Plutonio entered at No. 1 with 922,471 views, almost double the 467,552 that "Dai Dai" drew in second place.

The song's weekly total is now 55% below the peak of 117,818,800 views that PPC Land recorded for the week ending August 6, though part of that comparison straddles the August 24 change in view counting. When the track first took the global No. 1 in late May, it did so with 44,129,627 views. Its current weekly total is still about 20% above that debut figure.

Its lead over the rest of the global chart has narrowed. "KALYANI (Remix)" by ARJN, KDS, FIFTY4 and Shreya Ghoshal is second with 40,654,524 views, which leaves "Dai Dai" about 30% ahead. In the week ending August 6, the No. 1 drew 3.7 times as many views as the No. 2 song.

Thirteen leaders in 15 markets

Across the 15 national charts, 13 different songs hold the No. 1 position. That compares with ten different leaders a week earlier. Only two songs lead more than one market: "Dai Dai" in Germany and the Netherlands, and "Choosin' Texas" in the US and Australia.

The remaining leaders are local. "KALYANI (Remix)" leads India with 31,716,480 views. "Peão Todo Tatuado" by jeninho and Mariana Fagundes leads Brazil with 7,363,459 views in its 28th week. Tulus's "Teh Hijau" leads Indonesia with 11,307,642. In Japan the top song is "Yes! 東京", a collaboration credited to EBiDAN Ebisu Gakuen Boys Club, Chotokkyu, M!LK and GNJB, with 6,360,441 views. Spain's leader is "BbY WOW" with 1,565,969. South Africa's is "Remember" by Tman Xpress, Mellow and Sleazy, with 2,608,821. Kenya's is "Nikumbuke" by Joel Lwaga and Diamond Platnumz, with 696,054. And the Philippines' is "Mahal Magmahal" by Esremborak, which climbed from fourth to first with 7,832,321 views.

The fragmentation extends below the top spot. The 1,500 national chart positions in the set are filled by 1,116 distinct recordings, identified by YouTube URL. Of those, 963, or 86.3%, appear in only one market. Seventy-eight appear in two markets, and only three appear in ten or more. "Dai Dai" and KATSEYE's "Hootie Frutti" each chart in 11 of the 15 markets, the widest reach of any recording. KATSEYE's "Animal" is in ten. A week earlier, "Hootie Frutti" was in 12.

The share of each national chart that is unique to that market varies widely. In Japan, 97 of the 100 songs appear on no other national chart in the set. Kenya has 92, South Africa 91 and India 90. At the other end, only 25 of the UK's 100 songs are exclusive to the UK, 26 of Australia's and 32 of the Netherlands'. Those three charts share much of their content with each other and with the US.

Where the global chart comes from

At least 32 of the 100 songs on the global chart also appear on India's national chart. The combined global views of those 32 songs come to 439,461,746, and India's chart alone accounts for 373,337,189 of that, about 85%. India's own top 100 drew 669,064,495 views this week, 39.7% of the 1,684,440,294 views across all 15 national charts and 4.4 times the US total of 150,881,274. Both India and the combined total are slightly lower than in the week ending October 1, when PPC Land counted 698,623,952 views for India, about 40% of the combined figure.

Brazil is the second-largest national chart in the set with 204,187,552 views, ahead of Indonesia (175,580,193), the US, Japan (128,573,051) and the Philippines (124,360,508). The smallest is the Netherlands, at 6,185,841.

Seven songs in the global top 100 appear on none of the 15 national charts. They include "Peshta" by Xamdam Sobirov at No. 6 with 25,437,943 views, a Thai-language track by PORZAX that debuted at No. 79, and "Zombie" by The Cranberries at No. 89. The dataset cannot say which countries supplied those views.

A related pattern shows up with the Turkish rapper Blok3, who has four songs in the global top 41: "Sebebi Yar (Live)" at No. 11 with 20,429,165 views, "Kayıp Kalp" at No. 30, "Kırgınım" at No. 39 and "Çok Güzel Gülüyorsun" at No. 41. Among the 15 national charts in the set, all four appear only in Germany and the Netherlands. There is no Turkish chart in the files, so the most likely source of most of those views is outside the set. This is an inference from the data rather than something the files state.

How much of a song's audience watches the official video?

The global Top Songs chart and the global Top Music Videos chart measure different things. According to YouTube's chart methodology, Top Songs combines views of the official music video, lyric videos and user-made videos that use the official recording. Top Music Videos counts official music videos only. Because both files list a YouTube URL for each entry, the two can be matched.

Fifty-eight of the 100 songs on the global chart have their linked URL on the Top Music Videos chart for the same week. For those 58, the linked video's views as a share of the song's total range from 28.8% to 99.9%, with a median of 63.8%.

At the top of the chart, "Dai Dai" draws 39,164,936 views on its official video and 52,838,019 as a song, a share of 74.1%. That is close to the 71.5% implied by the figures PPC Land reported for the August 6 week, when the official video had 84,216,180 views against 117,818,800 for the song. For "Patient Zero", the newly charting video holds 57.8% of the song's views.

Several of the most-watched songs sit much lower:

  • "BbY WOW" by KAROL G, Judeline and rusowsky: the linked upload, labelled as a visualizer, drew 11,569,584 of the song's 35,563,636 views, or 32.5%.
  • "Hootie Frutti" by KATSEYE: the official music video drew 7,719,616 of 22,744,420, or 33.9%. A second "Hootie Frutti" upload at No. 63 on the videos chart, with 5,109,480 views, brings the two together to 56.4%.
  • "KALYANI (Remix)": the linked video drew 17,435,018 of 40,654,524, or 42.9%. A second "KALYANI (Remix)" upload at No. 15, with 9,307,593 views, takes the combined official share to 65.8%.
  • "Parvati" by Sadhu Tiwari: 50.9% on the linked video, rising to 71.6% with a second upload at No. 44.
  • "Alfaaz" by Hamza Malik and Zain Zohaib: 4,822,454 of 16,771,465, or 28.8%, the lowest share among the matched songs.

At the other end, "Casa Tupka Anthemo" by Yo Yo Honey Singh draws 91.2% of its song views on one video, "Basinga Balaalu" 90.5% and "Peshta" 93.5%. The highest is "Love All Day" by SxyCip at 99.9%, meaning nearly every view the song received in the week came through its official video.

The remaining 42 global songs have linked URLs that do not appear on the videos chart, whose 100th entry drew 4,270,088 views. Assuming the videos chart ranks every eligible official video, each of those linked uploads drew fewer views than that. On that assumption, their official share is capped somewhere between 19.4% and 61.0% of the song's total, depending on the song.

"SaWaDiKa" offers a contrast over time. In its debut week, about 94% of its song-chart views came through the official video, according to PPC Land's analysis. Four weeks later, the official video accounts for 56.6%: 8,796,370 of 15,541,762. Whether that reflects audiences shifting to other uploads, or simply the official video's own audience falling faster, the files cannot separate.

The Golden anomaly

One entry on the videos chart has no matching song on the global songs chart at all. The official video for "Golden" by HUNTR/X, EJAE, AUDREY NUNA, REI AMI and the KPop Demon Hunters cast is No. 9 on the Top Music Videos chart with 14,017,943 views, in its 52nd period. That figure would place it between No. 25 and No. 26 on the global songs list. Yet no song titled "Golden" appears there.

Four national charts instead list a combined entry, "What It Sounds Like + Golden (feat. BABYMONSTER)", credited to the KPop Demon Hunters cast and HUNTR/X, in its 68th period. It is No. 3 in the UK, No. 4 in Australia, No. 5 in the US with 3,366,877 views, and No. 9 in the Netherlands. YouTube's methodology says songs that chart for several months without significant viewership growth may be removed, but the files do not say whether that rule, a change in how the recording is grouped, or something else explains the absence. Golden led YouTube's charts at the end of 2025, which makes its absence from the global songs list notable.

A similar split affects Dua Lipa. "Training Season" is No. 10 on the global songs chart with 22,000,004 views, while a separate upload titled "Training Season (Live)" sits at No. 13 on the videos chart with 10,442,368 views. The songs chart links to a different URL, which does not appear on the videos chart.

Why the split matters for advertisers

YouTube's music charts are a public, weekly, cross-market record of where attention concentrates on the platform. The company stopped supplying its data to Billboard's charts in January 2026 after objecting to how Billboard weighted ad-supported streams against subscription streams. Since then, YouTube's own exports have been the company's main public account of music consumption on the service.

The matching exercise adds a dimension that a ranking alone does not show. For a large share of top songs, the official music video is only part of the picture. A median of 63.8% means that, for the typical matched song, more than a third of its YouTube audience in the week watched something other than the URL the chart links to: a lyric video, a second official upload, a visualizer, or one of the user-made videos that the songs chart counts. For marketers placing ads around music content, or brands working with artists on video campaigns, the official upload is the visible part of a song's reach, not all of it.

The numbers also show how fast the audience around a major release can contract. "Patient Zero" lost 44.8% of its global views and 51.8% of its US views in seven days. In each of the release weeks PPC Land has tracked this year, the second week delivered a materially smaller audience. "SaWaDiKa" fell about 79% in its second week, "GO" dropped 19 places, and now "Patient Zero" has fallen 20 places. Meanwhile, songs with long chart tenure, such as "Choosin' Texas" at 49 US periods or "Peão Todo Tatuado" at 28 Brazilian periods, hold No. 1 positions without growing.

Shorts: few views, long tails

The global Top Shorts Songs chart, which ranks songs by the number of Shorts created with them, has a different composition again. "PASSO BEM SOLTO (Slowed)" by ATLXS holds No. 1 in its 81st period. PPC Land reported the same track at No. 1 in its 72nd period in August, and in its 51st period in March, so the count has advanced by exactly one period each week since then.

Only 12 of the 50 Shorts songs also appear on the global songs top 100. "KALYANI (Remix)" is No. 2 on Shorts and No. 2 on the songs chart, and "Raya (Slowed)" by Zericxxn climbed from 17th to third on Shorts and from 78th to 58th on the global songs list, with views up about 15%. Seven of the 50 Shorts entries carry "Slowed" in the title and three more are "funk" edits. Apart from "Raya (Slowed)", none of those ten reaches the global songs chart. "BbY WOW", No. 3 on the global songs chart, enters the Shorts chart at No. 47 in its first period. Taylor Swift's "Patient Zero" does not appear on the Shorts chart.

The Shorts chart's lack of view counts limits what can be concluded. A song used in many Shorts may be watched little, and a song watched heavily may be used in few. A week earlier, PPC Land counted ten overlaps between the Shorts chart and the global top 100. The rise to 12 this week is a single data point.

Other movements

The global chart had nine debuts and 12 re-entries. The highest debut was "Mahal Magmahal" at No. 77 with 8,067,787 views, followed by "Kabze" by Bintu Pabra, Shiva Choudhary and others at No. 78, and the PORZAX track at No. 79. The biggest climb was Satinder Sartaaj's "Guzarish", up 37 places from 56th to 19th, with views rising about 43%. The biggest fall was "Endhayya Saami", down 61 places from 36th to 97th.

On the national charts, Japan had the largest single move. "KO1KEYZ" by KO1KEYZ jumped 78 places from 98th to 20th, with views up about 249%. The Philippines had "Baby 123" by RAPROJECT SIX, which went from 75th to ninth with views up about 380%. Kenya's "Kucheza Unajua Dance" by Zuchu, Matua Tz and Desmile TZ climbed 42 places to ninth. Germany had the most debuts of any market, with 21, led by "INAT" by Zeynep Bastık and Dhurata Dora at No. 5.

The global Top Artists chart remains dominated by Indian performers. Alka Yagnik leads with 481,424,170 views, ahead of Udit Narayan with 355,197,229, Arijit Singh with 323,666,055, Shreya Ghoshal with 294,967,463 and Kumar Sanu with 270,776,790. Those five account for 1,726,031,707 views. By a manual classification of the 100 names, 46 are Indian artists, accounting for 54.6% of the chart's 9,618,744,775 total views. Twenty-seven Latin American and Spanish-language artists, led by Bad Bunny at No. 6, account for 23.2%. KATSEYE, at No. 19, has been on the artists chart for only 71 periods but draws 121,279,927 views a week. Two artists entered without a previous rank: Mrs. GREEN APPLE at No. 93 and Carín León at No. 99.

The longest-tenured entry on the global songs chart is "NO BATIDÃO" by slxughter at No. 37, in its 50th period. On the national charts, the UK and Australia share the longest runner: Alex Warren's "Ordinary", at No. 4 in the UK after 87 periods and No. 5 in Australia after 85. In Japan, back number's "Christmas Song" sits at No. 81 in its 81st period, in early October.

Timeline

Summary

Who: YouTube, which publishes the weekly chart files; Taylor Swift, whose "Patient Zero" lost 44.8% of its global views in its second week; Ella Langley, whose "Choosin' Texas" retook the US and Australian No. 1; Shakira and Burna Boy, whose "Dai Dai" held the global No. 1; and advertisers and marketers who use YouTube music content and audience data.

What: Nineteen YouTube chart files covering the global songs, videos, artists and Shorts charts and 15 national songs charts. "Patient Zero" fell from 24,777,513 to 13,680,832 global views. Thirteen different songs lead the 15 national charts. Matching the songs and videos charts shows the linked official upload accounts for a median 63.8% of a top song's views, with "Golden" absent from the global songs chart despite 14,017,943 views on its official video.

When: The chart week ending October 8, 2026, compared with the week ending October 1 and with earlier weeks documented by PPC Land.

Where: YouTube worldwide, with national detail for Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US.

Why: The data shows how quickly a major release's audience can contract after its first week, and that a large share of song viewing on YouTube happens away from the official music video. For marketers using music content, the official upload captures only part of a song's audience.