Although Machine Gun Kelly dropped his Eminem diss track “Rap Devil” along with a music video, Em’s response “Killshot” debuted on YouTube without an accompanying set of visuals. Despite this fact, the track broke YouTube’s record for most views for a hip-hop video in 24 hours anyway. As Billboard reports the song racked up 38.1 million views in its first 24 hours of release. This is the biggest debut for a hip-hop video ever, and the third-biggest debut in YouTube history across all genres.
The diss track was hotly anticipated and ended up dropping only on YouTube and AudioMack, making the broken record slightly less surprising. “Killshot” is now available on all streaming services, but has yet to show up amongst Spotify’s 200 most-streamed songs since it migrated over. This means the vast majority of all “Killshot” streaming has been done on YouTube, helping to boost its numbers on the platform. The song was also wildly popular on Genius, smashing the record for fastest song to one million pageviews previously held by Pusha T’s “The Story of Adidon.”
“Killshot” is destined to debut on the Billboard Hot 100 chart next week, although exactly where is tough to predict. It’s managed to earn almost as many YouTube views in four days (81.7 million) as “Rap Devil” has in two weeks (98.8 million). However, recent changes to the Billboard Hot 100 algorithm calculations give less weight to unpaid streaming services like YouTube as compared paid ones like Apple Music and Spotify’s subscription tier. Since “Killshot” has fewer streams on the latter platforms, its standings could be negatively affected.
“Rap Devil” debuted at No. 13 on the Hot 100 chart this week, marking the second-highest chart position of MGK’s career after his 2017 Camila Cabello collaboration “Bad Things.”
Genius recently broke down everything you need to know about “Killshot”:
Read all the lyrics to Eminem’s “Killshot” on Genius now.
