songs that weren't a bands biggest hit, but have gone on to be their legacy song and biggest iTunes seller

It's in Dazed and Confused...twice.

Also still a CR Radio staple.

sure, but it's eight minutes long and mostly instrumental - hardcore CR, not so crossovery, whereas "cat scratch fever," also in regular rotation, is conventionally hooky and compact. i've definitely heard it many many more times in my life.

the mostly-instrumentalness of it all might make it easier for listeners to reckon with the fact they're listening to a song by crazy pants ted nugent

^^Bingo. Also probably figures in on a ton of "Classic Rock Guitar/Drums/Epic's/Road Trip Jams etc." playlists.

Speaking tho of hooky and compact, "Immigrant Song" boasts Zep's most famous hook in a handy 2:26 package.

where do you get cross platform streaming stats? “stranglehold” is the first song on Spotify’s official Ted Nugent playlist, a lot of people just listen to one song and move on I think

epic guitar jams playlists is a pretty plausible theory tbh

97 million streams for Stranglehold is pretty amazing in any case. Thats pretty much tied with Dr. Feelgood and Peace of Mind, and 27 million ahead of Crazy on You.

i wonder if we could find a suitable formula that would take into account a song's length + number of streams to determine the (shortest or longest) song with the greatest amount of streamable density

Speaking tho of hooky and compact, "Immigrant Song" boasts Zep's most famous hook in a handy 2:26 package.

except for the 2:26 run time, that explains barracuda's reign atop the heart catalog.

as for zep, the classic rock radio i grew up with in the northeast played whole lotta love, black dog and rock and roll more than any other zep tracks, if memory serves. stairway and kashmir a little less, presumably because of the length. (d'yer mak'er might've been in the top bucket, too, but i've tried to block out that memory.) immigrant song - probably my fave zep hit - got less play than any of those, which, besides the god-like hook and the superhuman vocal, may have had something to do with why i loved it so much. radio never gave me the chance to get sick of it.

Yeah, that sounds like my experience. Tbh, I think heard "Hey Hey What Can I Do" (the B-side of "Immigrant Song") more often on the radio than "Immigrant Song".

(in the 80s and 90s)

i don't recall "immigrant song" being played when i was regularly listening to classic rock radio in the late 90s-early 2000s.

Barracuda appears to have been on many more soundtracks than other Heart songs xps

https://www.tunefind.com/artist/heart

why is 'Harness Youre Hopes' Pavement's most played song?

oh, I see we discussed it a bit upthread but no satisfactory conclusions

There's a brief reddit thread that suggests it's a Spotify algorithm as it always seems to come up on shuffle.

Interestingly, if you look at their Last FM page it's the most scrobbled track for any of the charts up to the last year but when you change it to 'All Time' it doesn't even make the Top 60.

And going off the Last FM figures it's been scrobbled 56 thousand times in the last year but only received 2,500 scrobbles in all the years before

(it also appears again on the list with slightly different metadata)

there was talk earlier in the thread that Peter Gabriel's "In Your Eyes" was one of these songs. Strangely, his most streamed track on Spotify is "Solsbury Hill" though that may have to do with a lot of his work not being available on there for so long

and Mike + the Mechanics' #1 track is "Over My Shoulder"--which didn't chart in the US.

Solsbury Hill doesn't seem that incongruous tbh - it's one of his most famous songs and has been used in countless TV shows and movies

yeah, but "In Your Eyes" isn't even as popular as PG's covers of Bowie and Arcade Fire

that is 100% because for a while those cover albums were gabriel's only music on spotify.

i think solsbury hill might've been up there too on an OST

The 12-inch mix of "Outstanding" by The Gap Band is 11 Million spins ahead of the next most popular "You Dropped A Bomb On Me", and over 25 million more the regular mix of "Outstanding".

"Yearning for Your Love" or GTFO

"You Are My High" has 108 billion streams.

that's cause the 12-inch mix of "outstanding" is better than "bomb" or the og mix. I imagine the real reason it's the top gap band is the electric slide.

yeah, that specific version of "outstanding" is also the one that's been sampled a lot in later years. great song either way, but i like the 12" mix specifically for reminding me of all the good stuff that's taken bits from it.

New Order - Age of Consent

It didn’t chart because it wasn’t even a single but it’s currently a top 3 song for them both in itunes and spotify. Maybe movie licensing via Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is the reason this one is so high?

New Order - Age of Consent

It didn’t chart because it wasn’t even a single but it’s currently a top 3 song for them both in itunes and spotify. Maybe movie licensing via Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is the reason this one is so high?

Kind of prefigures the sound of millennial indie.

I just heard it yesterday, on the DirecTV / Music Choice “Classic Alternative” channel.

Used in 'Girls' too and a bunch of other tv shows/films i've never heard of. Skateland? Misfits? Cold Case? Pretty popular with soundtrack-ers anyroad

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0627563/

Whatever the reason I’m happy it has become one of their best known songs, it’s probably a top 10 song of the 80s for me, let alone my favorite New Order song.

when i first started to dig into the new order discography in the early 2000s, "age of consent" was easily one of the highest highlights. i thought it *must* have been a single, but nope. awesome that it's so recognized these days. well deserved.

Yeah, that's always been one of their best tracks.

It has been mentioned upthread but The Beatles - Here Comes the Sun stands as their most streamed song on spotify with 500M views (follow up is Come Together with 300M) and it was also a song that didn’t chart since it wasn’t released as a single. Surprised it has become their top song.

Also noticed this one recently:

Blonde Redhead - For the damaged cod

Has 58M streams on spotify towering highly above the rest of their songs. I was confused because I used to love them back in the 90s and I wasn’t aware this was their “hit” song. Turns out it got very popular recently by being used in a Rick & Morty finale episode.

How did that happen re "Here Comes the Sun"? I would not have guessed it to be in the top 3. (I would have guessed some combination of "Let It Be", "Yesterday", and "Hey Jude".)

Summer playlists

* listens, not views

"Here Comes The Sun" was always a huge radio song, and in addition to summer playlists, I bet it pops up a bunch on 'Positive Vibes', 'Acoustic Moods', and 'Sixties Fun' playlists too.

Also, since it's their top track, it's currently the lead track on the 'This Is: The Beatles' playlist.

Weird Al’s top 5 doesn’t include Eat It or Fat.

Re: « HCTS » it’s weird cos I wouldn’t count it in their top 10 most popular tracks (which would be something like : She loves you, I wanna hold your hand, Help!, AHDN, Yesterday, Penny Lane, Strawberry FF, All you need is love, Hey Jude, Let it be...).
It’s not even on their « 1 »compilation !

My sense is that "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane" is more of a favourite of music snobs but not so much the general public, at least here. HCTS does get a lot of radio play; I just didn't think it was nearly as big as those others but it does sound less dated.

Weird Al’s top 5 doesn’t include Eat It or Fat.

Aside from Al also getting better since then, I'd guess his most-streamed tracks tend to be parodies of songs from the streaming era, plus maybe the Star Wars one.

Amish Paradise is his number one

A parody source with multi-generational appeal!