Counting Stars

"Counting Stars" is a song by American pop rock band OneRepublic from their third studio album, Native (2013). The song was written by lead singer Ryan Tedder, and produced by Tedder and Noel Zancanella. Musically, it is a folk song that features a pop arrangement as well as disco beats. It was released as the album's third single on June 14, 2013 in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

The song has been one of the band's most successful singles, reaching number one in many countries including Canada and the United Kingdom, number two in the United States, and top ten in 20 countries. It has sold over 1 million copies in the United Kingdom and over 8 million copies worldwide, becoming one of the best-selling singles of all time.

The song's accompanying music video, directed by James Lees, features the band performing in the ground floor of a building (there are few basements in New Orleans) beneath an ongoing church congregation on the upper floor. As of February 2016, the video has received over 1.14 billion views on YouTube and is the 14th most watched video of all time on the site.

OneRepublic

OneRepublic is an American pop rock band. Formed in Colorado Springs, Colorado in 1996 by Ryan Tedder and Zach Filkins, the band achieved commercial success on Myspace as an unsigned act. In late 2003, after OneRepublic played shows throughout the Los Angeles area, a number of record labels approached the band with interest, but OneRepublic ultimately signed with Velvet Hammer, an imprint of Columbia Records. They made their first album with producer Greg Wells during the summer and fall of 2005 at his studio, Rocket Carousel, in Culver City, California. The album was originally scheduled for release on June 6, 2006, but the group was dropped by Columbia two months before the album ever came out. The lead single of that album, "Apologize", was released in 2005. It received some recognition on Myspace in 2006.

In 2007, OneRepublic released their debut album, Dreaming Out Loud. Its lead single, "Apologize", was notably remixed by Timbaland, becoming a huge international success, reaching number one in sixteen countries, subsequently earning them a Grammy Award nomination. The second single, "Stop and Stare", mirrored its predecessor's success. The album was later certified Platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). The band's second album, Waking Up (2009), produced the successful singles, "All the Right Moves", "Secrets", "Marchin On", and "Good Life", with Good Life reaching the top ten of the US Billboard Hot 100.

Star

A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun. Other stars are visible to the naked eye from Earth during the night, appearing as a multitude of fixed luminous points in the sky due to their immense distance from Earth. Historically, the most prominent stars were grouped into constellations and asterisms, and the brightest stars gained proper names. Extensive catalogues of stars have been assembled by astronomers, which provide standardized star designations.

For at least a portion of its life, a star shines due to thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium in its core, releasing energy that traverses the star's interior and then radiates into outer space. Once the hydrogen in the core of a star is nearly exhausted, almost all naturally occurring elements heavier than helium are created by stellar nucleosynthesis during the star's lifetime and, for some stars, by supernova nucleosynthesis when it explodes. Near the end of its life, a star can also contain degenerate matter. Astronomers can determine the mass, age, metallicity (chemical composition), and many other properties of a star by observing its motion through space, luminosity, and spectrum respectively. The total mass of a star is the principal determinant of its evolution and eventual fate. Other characteristics of a star, including diameter and temperature, change over its life, while the star's environment affects its rotation and movement. A plot of the temperature of many stars against their luminosities, known as a Hertzsprung–Russell diagram (H–R diagram), allows the age and evolutionary state of a star to be determined.