What is T-Series, the YouTube channel that’s about to surpass PewDiePie in subscribers?

After nearly five years of being YouTube’s most subscribed channel, PewDiePie’s reign is about the come to an end.

In a video recently posted to his YouTube channel titled “THIS CHANNEL WILL OVERTAKE PEWDIEPIE!,” Felix Kjellberg (aka PewDiePie) informed his nearly 66 million subscribers that his time as the most subscribed YouTube channel is coming to an end. It’s a title he’s had since December 22, 2013.

So, which channel is going to dethrone the YouTube star from his coveted “most subscribed channel” perch?

The soon-to-be most subscribed channel on YouTube is T-Series, a music and film production company in India that uploads daily Bollywood music videos to its channel.

Founded in 1983 by Gulshan Kumar, T-Series’ early business model involved piracy — not too different from YouTube’s own early days. Not long after its start, T-Series transitioned from hawking pirated cassette tapes to releasing Bollywood soundtracks of its own. In 1990, the company released the soundtrack to the film, Aashiqui. Composed by the musical duo of Nadeem–Shravan, the album went on to sell 20 million units, becoming one of the all-time best selling Bollywood soundtrack albums.

While T-Series is on its way to hitting another huge milestone when it surpasses PewDiePie in subscriber count next month, it’s not the first time its taken PewDiePie down either. That happened in February of last year when T-Series became the most viewed YouTube channel.

The T-Series channel also holds a number of other major YouTube records. The channel is currently the most subscribed Asian YouTube channel as well as the most subscribed non-English YouTube channel. T-Series is also the second channel to ever reach 60 million subscribers, after PewDiePie of course.

So, how did PewDiePie’s all-but-certain fall from atop the YouTube mountain come to pass? Is he still hemorrhaging subscribers due to his various controversies? No, not at all. PewDiePie gains over 30,000 YouTube subscribers a day according to SocialBlade, a company that tracks YouTube and other social media platform statistics. 

The problem for PewDiePie is that he simply can’t keep up with the machine that the T-Series YouTube channel. The YouTube channel for the Bollywood music giant grows at close to 145,000 subscribers per day.

T-Series, having started in the 1980s, is a legacy brand in India, a country with a population of 1.3 billion people. It has employees and an entire roster full of musical artists and Bollywood superstars that it relies on to pump out as many as half-a-dozen highly-produced music videos per day. In contrast, PewDiePie is just one guy putting out one vlog or video game stream per day. 

If you look at both PewDiePie and T-Series’ most popular videos, the latter’s domination on the platform becomes even clearer. The most viewed video uploaded by PewDiePie, the current king of YouTube, sits at 83 million views. The T-Series channel’s most viewed video has 565 million views. In fact, T-Series has 94 videos that surpass PewDiePie’s most popular video when it comes to view count.

So, get your popcorn ready. According the SocialBlade, we can look forward to T-Series surpassing PewDiePie in YouTube subscribers around October 21 of this year.