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

Breastcrawl OTM, "I Was Made for Loving You" is by far the best-known Kiss song in Finland too.

Yeah, if you asked people in the UK to name a Kiss song imagine most would plump for Crazy Crazy Nights xps

Ween's Ocean Man's journey to becoming their legacy track (60M+ compared to 5M for Voodoo Lady off Chocolate and Cheese, which also feels like the wrong song off that record) was apparently its inclusion in the Spongebob movie and then becoming a sort of meme. It was pointedly left off their 2018 best of.

Voodoo Lady was on a lot of alt-rock stations at the time, if I remember correctly.

Do those guys get along now? Still tour? I know there was a big falling out..

They abruptly cancelled their March-and-subsequent tour dates this year, must have broken up again

One for the Pavement fans

https://www.stereogum.com/2105993/pavement-harness-your-hopes-spotify/columns/sounding-board/

Even as a massive Pavement head, I can't ever remember hearing the official (non-Peel/BBC) recording of "Harness" (listening now).

Wow that's really interesting

lol
When requested, Spotify declined to provide an interview with McDonald

shoulda posted yr questions on the Spotify thread

No kidding, lol. Interesting article, even if it doesn’t really answer the question. (It touches on the same sort of speculations that were aired earlier in this thread, when the song came up.)

weirdly on my Spotify ALL of Pavement's top 5 (with Harness your Hopes as #1" are listed as <1000 plays...? #5 is... their cover of "The Killing Moon"?

Oh yeah, THIS song. And I would agree that sonically, this is somehow more "normal" than most Pavement; I mean, Malkmus sings like he sings, but the basic guitar/drum infrastructure is much more straight-ahead 70s AOR than the median Pavement track.

Yes -- this is sort of a stretch:

It’s hard not to see the zombified success of the song as being anything but for the best, because in this case it really is a great Pavement track — one that captures the essence of the band accurately and deeply

(and, for the record, it really does sound like a B-side -- Malkmus had it right the first time!)

According the YouTube & Spotify, Dylan's legacy song could be "Knockin' On Heaven's Door." It's in second place on both services (#1, though not by much, is either Mr Tambourine Man or Like A Rolling Stone). I wonder if the Guns N Roses cover drove the interest?

He might have been right about "Summer Babe" too, which much as I adore it is somehow not REALLY a Pavement song, it should be a beloved B-side

!!

what the

come on, you can play that shit at a campfire, it is a fantastic song but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of what pavement was doing

there are a lot of pavement songs you can play at a campfire

I disagree and I've tried

"Gold Soundz" I guess but I also consider that not quite at the center of the Pavement project!

off the top of my head, there's also "here," "cut your hair," "shady lane," and "range life"

OK agreed on "shady lane" and "range life"

but not, like, "trigger cut"

would love to hear someone take a crack at "conduit for sale!"

i have definitely been around a backyard firepit where someone was playing a guitar and everybody was singing along to "range life." went really well next to "you ain't goin' nowhere."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjNxmz6Ty0E

Why Is The Obscure B-Side “Harness Your Hopes” Pavement’s Top Song On Spotify? It’s Complicated

https://www.stereogum.com/2105993/pavement-harness-your-hopes-spotify/columns/sounding-board/

Also mentioned in this article:

But looking at a similar situation of his own, Damon Krukowski wasn’t so sure. The musician and writer was fascinated with the question of how “Strange” became his former band Galaxie 500’s top Spotify track — by a significant margin — even though it was not a single, was never particularly popular in the past, and wasn’t being picked up on any prominent playlists.

u might wanna scroll up

Oops! Thought it was an article that came out today and immediately thought of this thread.

It did come out today — WE’RE THAT FAST!!!

"Strange" always *seemed* like a relatively popular G500 track to me. I definitely heard it on radio as a wee bairn (I recorded it to C90, years before I found a retail copy), and one doesn't think "why *that* track though?" when it appears in Greenberg. The trajectory of the very b-side-sounding "Harness" is several orders of magnitude odder, IMHO.

Interesting to discover how the Autoplay function appears to work. I'd always assumed it was based on some sort of "other users who listened to this track also listen to these tracks" type algorithm but that article seems to suggest it's actually based on song structure analysis.

xp I had the same impression! Here's Stereogum in 2014 listing "Strange" at #9 in a list of the best Galaxie 500 songs (which holds Today and This Is Our Music in much higher esteem than the Spotify listeners appear to)

Is it weird that I continue to be fascinated by this thread but don't use any of these services?

An obvious and logical one but still funny/wtf is McCartney's top Spotify : by FAR "FourFiveSeconds" (+700 million ! followed by "Wonderful Christmas Time" at... only 176 million).

Seems Spotify streams aren't much of an arbiter of a song's actual popularity in many cases, although it'd be interesting to know whether some of the random picks mentioned here do actually become legacy songs because of exposure via algorithmic quirks.

By far Squeeze's top song on Spotify is "Tempted" and while it was arguably by default their biggest hit single in the US (#49) it was essentially a commercial flop not even hitting the top 40 in the UK. I'm not exactly sure how it bubbled up to become their legacy track.

"Tempted" was a fairly big MTV hit upon release, and has been in tons of commercials and movies. Also: Paul Carrack=GOLD.

Oddly enough, "Hourglass" was a way bigger US Pop hit (#15), as was something called "853-5937" (#32).

By far Squeeze's top song on Spotify is "Tempted" and while it was arguably by default their biggest hit single in the US (#49)

I just peeked at their singles sales and was surprised to learn that this is not a true statement!

While I remember "Tempted" being huge here in the states, 2 other singles charted higher (and I don't recall either of them by name):

"Hourglass" (#15 US Top 40, 1987)

"853-5937" (#32 US Top 40, 1988)

xp

Okay, I remember "Hourglass", sounds like a Was (Not Was) production.

"853-5937" does not *ring* a bell... (sorry)

"Hourglass" was helped along by it's video.

"853-5937" sounds like an undiscovered CVS Jam.

I remember seeing the videos for both of those Squeeze songs at the time, and in fact there was an article in the newspaper where someone with that phone number complained about all the crank calls they were receiving.