Bhushan Kumar, the chairman and managing director of Bollywood record label T-Series, has acknowledged that the Great Subscriber War with PewDiePie filled his company with unease at first, and accused the vlogger of unleashing the conflict.
“It was an unnecessary thing, which started from his side,” Kumar said in an interview with Indian magazine Business Today. “We reacted by not saying anything against him when he was saying many things against our company and our country.
“We were a little paranoid initially,” he admitted, recalling how T-Series launched the #BharatWinsYouTube campaign to seek more subscriptions from Indians in response to the ‘Subscribe to PewDiePie’ movement.
“They were hacking Google accounts and were forcing people to subscribe to PewDiePie,” Kumar continued, referring to Pewds-aligned hackers who cracked Google Chromecast devices and forced them to display a call to subscribe to the Swede.
“We knew it will die out and it did,” the T-Series head added.
T-Series currently has close to 105 million subscribers and tops the list of most popular YouTube channels. PewDiePie is trailing behind with nearly 97.5 million subscribers – which still makes him the biggest independent creator on the platform.
“Actually, there is no competition between us and PewDiePie,” Kumar said. “According to me, PewDiePie is the number one independent creator on YouTube and we are a company. Even today we get so many comments that read 'subscribe to PewDiePie' on our channel. You can't stop people on social media."
One of the most talked-about rivalries in internet history, the battle drew to a close this year, with Pewds losing his title of the most-subscribed YouTube channel.
T-Series shied away from the battle for most of the time, confining itself to the #BharatWinsYouTube campaign and a complaint with an Indian court accusing PewDiePie of “defamatory” and “disparaging” diss tracks about the company.
The tracks were eventually blocked in India, while two weeks later the blogger ended his battle with T-Series, saying that some overly enthusiastic fans did him a disservice.
