One Direction Celebrates 10 Years with New Website, Viral Video
10 years ago, Simon Cowell formed a group of 5 lads from the reality talent search “The X Factor UK” and called them One Direction. The group’s first-ever single “What Makes You Beautiful” was released and it became a monster hit! The music video for the track has amassed a whopping 1,166,842,107 views on YouTube. In comparison, K-pop boy group BTS has yet to hit 1 billion views (their biggest MV is “DNA” which garnered 968 million views so far) in a single music video but of course, 1D is three years older than them and K-pop is not yet immensely popular in the west at that time.
Relive the MV for “What Makes You Beautiful” below:
In celebration of the group’s 10th anniversary, they launched a brand new website www.10yearsof1d.com to commemorate and rediscover their journey right from the very beginning. The new site has lots of surprises for fans. It features a lot of new content, including interactive playlists, as well as reformatted EPs featuring B-sides and rare songs, remixes, live recordings, and acoustic versions of their tracks (you need a Spotify or Apple Music account in order to access these).
The new site is bannered by the four remaining members Harry Styles, Niall Horan, Liam Payne, and Louis Tomlinson. Zayn Malik, who officially left the group in 2015 to pursue a solo career, was only included in the celebration video which is trending at no. 1 right now on YouTube Philippines and worldwide.
Let’s take a look back at some of the band’s most iconic moments on “10 Years of One Direction,” a 1D celebration video below which garnered a whopping 7,484,138 views in just 12 hours!