The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber’s ‘Stay’ reaches 1billion YouTube views

The Kid LAROI and Justin Bieber’s ‘Stay’ has joined YouTube’s Billion Views Club.

• READ MORE: The Kid LAROI talks new single ‘Stay’ with Justin Bieber and shares update on debut album

Per Billboard, the hit single marks LAROI’s first time reaching the milestone and Bieber’s 12th as a lead, featured artist or collaborator, with the latter’s first being the music video for his 2010 single ‘Baby’.

The video for ‘Stay’, which was released in July 2021, sees the duo frozen in time as LAROI deals with heartbreak.

It was filmed in an abandoned hotel in downtown Los Angeles, not far from the notorious Cecil Hotel, which has played host to many suicides and deaths since being built in 1924 – it was also the subject of the Netflix documentary Crime Scene: The Vanishing At The Cecil Hotel.

Speaking to NME about the famous location in 2021, LAROI said: “I watched [the documentary] on Netflix like two days after we shot the video and I was like, Oh God, that’s a crazy area. So I watched it and was like,’ Oh fuck’. I feel like if I had watched that before going there, I don’t know how long they would have had me there for.”

Check out the video below.

In 2021, LAROI told NME how Bieber’s involvement on the track came about. “One day I was just listening to it and was like, fuck, Justin [Bieber] would sound perfect on this,” he explained.

“So I actually pulled up to the studio that he works at, and I just came with the fucking file. I was like, ‘You ready?’ and he was like, ‘Yup’. And he just did it. He just went into the booth and just freestyled the shit off top; it was the craziest shit. I was like, ‘Yo, this guy’s out of his mind.’”

Asked about how he first came to work with Bieber, LAROI replied: “I actually never asked him how he found my shit. He just DM’d me one day on Instagram and was just like, ‘You got the sauce’, and I responded back and was like, ‘Yo, what’s up? I’m a big fan’. He liked my message and that was it from there.”

In other news, last month, Bieber shared a cryptic personal message in which he says he “hates” himself when he feels himself becoming “inauthentic”.

Late last month, the Canadian singer was seen rapping about being high, sparking concern from the public. The clip came just days after a representative for the ‘Stay’ singer shut down online rumours of drug use, branding the comments as “false” and “harmful”.

As well as comments about his health, there have also been reports that Bieber is back in the studio and planning a major comeback soon. These were heightened when he was seen in the studio at the start of the new year, and again when Mk.gee revealed that he had been working with the singer on new material.

If the studio output comes together as a full album, it will be his first studio release since 2021’s ‘Justice’.

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