Dua Lipa's 'Training Season' Live Video Has 39 Million More Views Than the Music Video

On 21 September the official video of Dua Lipa singing 'Training Season' at the Royal Albert Hall had 138,826,680 views on YouTube. The music video for the same song, published on 15 February 2024, had 99,414,264. The concert clip came out almost ten months later, on 8 December 2024, and it now leads the original by 39.4 million views, about 40 percent. Both counters are still climbing. The live recording also wins on Shazam, where people go to ask what a song is: on 21 September it was inside the top 50 in 54 of the 70 countries we read, and the studio recording was in none of them.

Same singer, same song, same speed, and one of them has 40 percent more viewers. We ran both recordings through the same measurements, read what viewers and charts say, and looked for the reason. The measurements show a real difference in how the song is built. They do not show why 39 million more people pressed play, and we mark the place where the evidence stops.

Why does the live 'Training Season' have more views than the music video?

The public evidence points to three things: a television-sized launch, a trend that landed on the live version, and a video that viewers say is better made. The launch first. The clip was posted on 8 December 2024, the day 'An Evening with Dua Lipa' aired on ITV1. That special was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall on 17 October 2024, and the live album from the same night came out on 6 December 2024 through Warner Records, with 'Training Season' as its fourth track, according to Wikipedia.

The trend came next. On 8 September the site Dua Source wrote that the Royal Albert Hall video had passed 100 million views and that the studio and live versions were each getting more than a million Spotify streams a day, nearly four million together. Thirteen days later our reading of the counter was 138.8 million. The video is being pulled in by people who are watching it now, and the top comments say so, as the last section shows.

What we cannot say is how much of the 39-million lead was already there before the trend. YouTube's public number is a running total and cannot be split by date. If the live video was ahead in early August, the trend widened a gap. If it was level, the trend built the gap. Nothing we can read in public settles that.

What changed in the live arrangement of 'Training Season'?

The tempo and the tonic stayed the same; what changed is where the song puts its weight. Our beat detector reads 123 beats per minute for both recordings, so the orchestra plays the song at the studio's speed. The key detector reads F minor for the live recording with a confidence of 0.81 and F major for the studio recording with 0.57. That is the same tonic and a weak second reading, so we do not claim a change of mode. Two other things did move. The live recording is about 14 decibels quieter on average (minus 26.1 against minus 12.0 decibels full scale in the audio YouTube serves), which is what one would expect from a hall recording that has not been mastered for radio. It is also slightly darker, with an average brightness of 2,428 hertz against 2,716.

The mix is more than a band. According to Wikipedia's entry on 'An Evening with Dua Lipa', she was joined by the Heritage Orchestra, 53 players conducted by Ben Foster, plus her seven-piece band and fourteen choristers. AllMusic's Neil Z. Yeung, as Wikipedia reports it, praised the arrangements and compared them to Mark Ronson's work. The clearest place to see that many players at work is the loudness curve. We cut each recording into eight equal slices and set the loudest slice to 100.

The studio track spends its energy early. Its loudest stretch is the first chorus, which the timed lyric sheet on lrclib places at about 0:47 to 1:18, and it never gets back to that level. The live version does the opposite. It begins at 45 percent of its own loudest slice where the studio begins at 66, adds level through the whole song, and peaks close to the end. The opposite case is BTS's 'Normal', a record whose level barely moves for three minutes. The live 'Training Season' is a song that keeps something in reserve.

Our number cannot say which instrument does that. It counts the voice, the band, the strings, the choir and the applause together, so it describes the recording, not the arrangement. The last studio chorus starts at about 2:56, near the live peak, but we have no timed lyric sheet for the live recording and do not tie the peak to a section. Google's own suggestions show that people are looking: on 21 September the searches offered for 'dua lipa training season live' included 'live orchestra'.

What does 'Training Season' mean?

It is a song about being finished with teaching people how to love her. A training season is the stretch before a sports season, when players practise and run drills. Dua Lipa borrows the phrase for dating: she has spent past relationships coaching partners, and 'training season's over' is her way of saying that the coaching is done.

The song opens with a doubt asked at night: whether the person in front of her is safe to love, or a poison she keeps going back to. Then she says what she wants: someone who holds her closer than anyone has, who speaks straight to her when she is vulnerable, who can take control, and who can talk until she gets dizzy. Two images are physical. She compares the love she wants to a rodeo, and the conversation leaves her with vertigo. The last stretch turns into a tryout. She asks whether the listener can compete, tells them to run when the whistle blows, and asks whether they are on her team or watching from the bench until someone gives the signal.

The sound is disco-pop with Eurodisco influences, according to Wikipedia, from her 2024 album Radical Optimism, with Kevin Parker of Tame Impala as producer. It came out as a single on 15 February 2024 and reached No. 4 in the UK and No. 27 on the US Hot 100. The words are on the artist's own lyric video, which has 28.5 million views; we describe them here and do not print them.

This section is also for readers who type the question in Indonesian. On 21 September Google's suggestions for 'training season dua lipa' included makna, artinya and tentang apa (meaning, and what is it about), and lirik and terjemahan (lyrics and translation). An English answer that stays close to the song's own words is the thing those searches are missing.

Why is 'Training Season' back on the charts?

A TikTok manifestation trend brought it back, and it began with something Dua Lipa said about choosing songs. Dua Source, on 8 September, traced it to her explanation that she picks the songs she releases carefully, because singing them over and over on tour helps manifest things in her life. That is the cause reported. We did not count TikTok posts, because we found no public count we could verify.

The charts followed. On 14 September Forbes's Hugh McIntyre reported that 'Training Season' jumped from No. 40 to No. 6 on the Billboard Global 200, from No. 20 to No. 3 on Billboard Global Excl. U.S., and entered Hot Dance/Pop Songs at No. 5 for the first time. In Britain it returned at No. 53 on 28 August and rose to No. 18 a week later, according to Wikipedia. When we read Official Charts on 21 September the single stood at No. 5, up from No. 7, against a 2024 peak of No. 4. A Spotify EP called 'Training Season's Over', released on 28 August with live versions of the song, gave the trend more to play, Wikipedia says.

Readers of the song's Wikipedia page followed too. Counting people rather than robots, the page averaged 167 views a day from 1 to 14 August and 666 a day from 14 to 20 September, with a peak of 1,047 on 9 September, according to Wikimedia's pageview data. It is not the only old song a feed has sent back up the charts. Katy Perry's 'The One That Got Away' shows the same pattern: on 19 September it led the weekly list in the Philippines, five months after a TikTok trend of its own began. Our global music trends page tracks what else is moving.

What are viewers saying about the live 'Training Season'?

They talk about how it was filmed, and they announce the day they arrived. We read the 40 most-liked comments on the live video on 21 September, 162,104 likes together. Five of them, worth 41,300 likes, are about the filming: 'whoever arranged the camera work is a mastermind' has 17,000 likes on its own, and others name the composition, the lighting and the cinematography. Ten are people saying they are watching in September 2026, most naming the day, from the 11th to the 20th, for 27,600 likes together. One, at 13,000 likes, says 'I'll come back when i got what i manifested.'

Three comments, 27,500 likes together, ask for more: a whole album in this jazz-and-orchestra style, and the concert on streaming. One, at 2,600 likes, asks the question this piece started with: 'Is it just me or is this better than the recorded version?' Our measurements cannot answer that. They show a different shape, a song that builds where the studio version peaks and settles.

That is what we can say about the 39-million gap. The live 'Training Season' arrived as a television event, it has a shape the studio recording does not, viewers praise how it was filmed, and a trend sent viewers to a video that was ready for them. What we cannot say is which of those made the difference. On 21 September, with both counters still moving, the live version was the one people were looking up, in 54 countries on Shazam, and the one in the comments.