Audioslave Shatters YouTube Subscriber Counts... Like A Stone

     The world of music on YouTube is a strange one, but it is certainly one worth following, especially when gauging how well some of our favorite artists from decades past fare in the modern era. Just last week, for example, Guns 'N' Roses hit 10 million subscribers; the band has also made headlines in the past few years as the songs "November Rain" and "Sweet Child O' Mine" each surpassed a billion views. Bands like Nirvana, whose song "Something in the Way" was recently featured in the box office hit The Batman, and Linkin Park have encountered similar success.

     Compared to these two groups, Audioslave's YouTube channel is relatively young in spite of the fact that the supergroup's three albums all came out in the 2000s. All of the music videos and audio were uploaded to YouTube via VEVO roughly a decade ago, but the dedicated YouTube channel was not created until Thanksgiving in 2020. Since then, it has exploded, garnering 380,000 subscribers. So, too, has the channel for Rage Against the Machine, which was created just over a year earlier yet has garnered 870,000 subscribers; RATM's channel did Audioslave's one better; they played during the 1990s.

     No, Audioslave's channel did not have any dedicated uploads until January 2022, five AOL Sessions videos from 2003 that have gotten a collective millions of views. These videos, combined with hit music videos like "Like A Stone," which has an astonishing 940 million views and is on track to hit a billion before the end of the year, has gotten the YouTube channel to where it is today: nearly 80 percent of the way to hitting 500,000 subscribers, which should occur in time for the channel's second anniversary. With this in mind, it is obvious that Audioslave will achieve one million subscribers at some point.

     It's not just about the legacy of Chris Cornell or the musical legacy of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave: it's about the legacy of good music and the culture that came with it.