A decade after it first dropped, Alan Walker’s ‘Faded’ has hit a milestone few electronic tracks ever reach: four billion views on YouTube. Released in December 2015 as a vocal reworking of his earlier instrumental ‘Fade’, with Norwegian singer Iselin Solheim on vocals, the track exploded into a genuine global phenomenon, topping charts in over a dozen countries, going diamond, and giving the world one of dance music’s most recognizable visuals in the hooded figure wandering through snow-covered Norway.
Crossing four billion views puts ‘Faded‘ in an extremely small club of electronic tracks to ever hit that number, and it speaks to longevity as much as the initial explosion. That mournful piano intro into a huge drop still lands the same way it did in 2015, which is part of why the track keeps finding new listeners a decade on. Walker hasn’t slowed down either — he’s continued touring globally and was recently added to the UNITY event lineup in Las Vegas, while catalog staples like ‘Alone’, ‘Sing Me To Sleep’ and ‘The Spectre’ keep racking up big numbers of their own.
Ten years in, ‘Faded’ shows no signs of fading from relevance, if this trajectory holds, it’s set to stay one of the genre’s defining records for a long time yet. 
