Since last year, HBO’s Game Of Thrones has held the dubious honor of being the Guinness World Record’s most pirated TV show, with scores of internet Onion Knights scouring the torrents to bring the show’s blend of political drama, gripping battles, and naked people to the non-paying masses. Now, at least partly in response to that unwanted badge of popularity, the show has achieved another: the record for “largest TV drama simulcast,” with the show’s fifth season premiere, “The Wars To Come,” broadcasting in 173 different countries at the same time. (The idea being, presumably, that eliminating the delay between releasing the show in different regions would cut down on at least one of the motivations for theft, even as the other—people being uniformly opportunistic engines of self-interest—continues to be supported by the text of the program itself.)
Game Of Thrones wasn’t the only pop-culture institution that racked up a new honor from the British catalogers of semi-pointless human extremity; NBC’s The Voice has been awarded “most tweeted TV series in one minute,” with more than 300,000 tweets—or 8.3 thumb-hours, assuming 10 seconds per tweet—hitting the show’s Twitter account in a 60-second span. Dr. Dre, Sandra Bullock, Sofia Vergara, and Taylor Swift, meanwhile, were all lauded for making ridiculous amounts of money in recent years.
This year’s standards of notability are also apparently putting a heavy focus on social media, with Meghan Trainor gaining recognition for being the first artist to enter the U.K. Top 40 solely on the strength of streaming plays, and online media sensation PewDiePie being given the plaque for most subscribers on YouTube. (Shakira, meanwhile, has the most Facebook likes, most likely from credibility-starved music fans, looking for news they can use from hips they can trust.)