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

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Still I would have expected "Satisfaction", "Brown Sugar", "Start Me Up", "Angie" to be the top songs, "Paint it Black" in the top5 maybe but certainly not at the top and "Gimme Shelter" not in the top (I'm sure plenty of people don't even particularly know it or wouldn't think of it as one of their most famous).

Feel like the first 4 are more like boomer hits and Paint It Black and Gimme Shelter are more appealing to Gen X and Millennials.

Why "Angie"? I think I heard that after I'd heard every other Stones hit.

Those, along with "Miss You", "You Can't Always Get What You Want", "Jumpin' Jack Flash", and "Honky Tonk Women", were the ones you'd most likely encounter on Classic Rock radio.

"Angie" was a #1 Pop hit in the states.

"Gimme Shelter" wasn't even a single.

It was a hugely popular album cut that's also been in every Scorsese film.

Oh sure but I mean, I think if I asked my mother (a boomer !) if she knows it and if she can hum it she wouldn't have a clue.

(she was never a Stones fan, obviously, and may only think of "Satisfaction" or "Angie" if asked to name some of their songs).

"Angie" was a #1 Pop hit in the states.

sure, but it never got the kind of classic rock airplay that Paint It Black, or many others, did

I heard it alot, although maybe not as much as some of the other aforementioned tracks. One thing that I think helps it with listeners is it's a string-laden ballad, so it rubs up well with "Imagine", "Candle In The Wind", "Desperado"...stuff like that.

In general all the Stones numbers look low to me - were they late getting added to Spotify?

Their numbers are pretty high for an artist whose popularity peaked well before Spotify existed. Comparable to, e.g. The Beatles and Elton John, well above an artist like Stevie Wonder or David Bowie. The only pre-1990s artist I can find who has streaming numbers significantly above theirs is Queen and I'd assume that's at least in part due to "Bohemian Rhapsody"

Millennials Love Queen

Yeah, my friends' kids (more or less 10yo) are obsessed with Queen. I guess that's due to the movie indeed. Still a bit strange to me.

Well, the Beatles arrived on Spotify (relatively) recently, with a lot of fanfare, is all. I just go back to those GnR numbers, where they have a song over a billion at this point.

Gonna go out on a limb and say a fair chunk of Stones listeners are still in the CD era

i think a band with a single "signature song" like gnr are more likely to have a song with a billion streams than the stones, who have several

There also are not very many 20th century songs with 1 billion streams on Spotify. The highest is "Bohemian Rhapsody" at around 1.6 billion and the 2nd highest is "Wonderwall" at around 1.2 billion, and then there's a smattering of others like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Sweet Child o Mine"

all strong points!

Stones most played on YT: Paint It Black most played by far, around 370M. Next are Sympathy, Angie, and Gimme Shelter all around 140 - 150M (adding in live versions etc).

and nearly all of the PIB views are from the (IMO) pretty cool official lyric video

when gnr were mentioned as having a signature song with a billion songs, I was sure that song would be "Welcome to the Jungle". I guess "Sweet Child o Mine" has broader appeal.

I thought they meant "My World".

"sweet child" was their sole #1 hit and definitely dwarfs "jungle" in radio plays

Yeah, in a perfect world their legacy signature song would be "Welcome to the Jungle" or "November Rain" but it's always been "Sweet Child" for as long as I can remember.

Somehow, Siouxsie & The Banshees's most played song on Spotify is "The Passenger" and it didn't even make the Top 40 in the UK. I thought for sure it would be "Cities In Dust" since it was such a big club hit, but it only comes in 5th. "Dear Prudence" was their biggest chart hit in the UK (#3) and is only their 4th most streamed song.

The song was featured at the end of Tonya Harding's biographical film I, Tonya (2017).[14]

Never mind, I just noticed "Cities in Dust"'s numbers are split between the album and single version, making it their most streamed song by a narrow margin. Still fits the thread title though.

Somehow, Siouxsie & The Banshees's most played song on Spotify is "The Passenger" and it didn't even make the Top 40 in the UK.

Definitely remember this having college-radio life in the US though, and at the time I definitely knew the band existed but couldn't have named another one of their songs.

In the U.S. “Kiss Them For Me” and “Peekaboo” were their big songs.

Sturgill Simpson's top Spotify track is "You Can Have The Crown" which is double lolz.

There also are not very many 20th century songs with 1 billion streams on Spotify. The highest is "Bohemian Rhapsody" at around 1.6 billion and the 2nd highest is "Wonderwall" at around 1.2 billion, and then there's a smattering of others like "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and "Sweet Child o Mine"

― justfanoe (Greg Fanoe), Wednesday, September 1, 2021 11:27 AM (eight hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Noticed the other day that "Don't Stop Believin'" is another (unsurprisingly).

Another point in "Gimme Shelter"'s favor: it's a track #1 on a canonical lp.

Be curious to see the most streamed tracks for each year. I suspect pre-Beatles, Christmas songs will dominate.

I've spent the last 5 minutes searching spotify trying to find 20th century songs with more than a billion streams. Kind of a fun game. So far I've found Toto's "Africa". "Billie Jean", "Take On Me" and "Every Breath You Take" are getting close.

Kind of surprised that no Madonna track has even 200 million streams.

"all i want for christmas is you" will get there soon enough

Ryan Tedder's explanation from a recent BBC interview

"Earlier this year, OneRepublic discovered their new single, Run, was being outperformed by Counting Stars - a foot-stomping, chart-topping anthem they originally released in 2013. "I was like, 'What the hell is going on?'" Tedder recalls. "And my manager was like, 'Oh, some kid took Counting Stars, and he sped it up and put it on Tik Tok, and it turned into a thing.

"It's a nightmare, because we live in a time when track seven off an album that you released six years ago has a greater chance of becoming a hit than the current song you're promoting. It defies gravity."

He cites the case of The Weeknd's smash hit Blinding Lights. An intoxicating, 80s-inspired pop smash, it was the biggest-selling song of 2020, spending a record-breaking 89 weeks (and counting) in the US singles chart.

But when it was first released in 2019, Blinding Lights looked like it would bomb. It entered the Billboard Hot 100 at 11, but swiftly fell to 52, and drifted aimlessly around the lower half of the countdown for two months.

"It wasn't blowing up by itself, it wasn't an overnight hit," Tedder says. "Then Blinding Lights ends up in a car commercial in Germany, and the song exploded in Germany. Then it jumped to Belgium and Holland and France and then the UK and Australia.

"But the whole story of that song, one of the biggest songs of all time, started from a car commercial. And so the moral of the story is, you have no control. No-one has an expletive clue which songs are going to catch fire."

Car commercials and a few movie and tv soundtracks seem to be the last top-down promotional models that aren't somewhere on the long tail.

Interesting comments but neither the viral democracy nor the tried and trusted ad exposure approach quite explain the glacial procession of the song's success which is probably more down to the plateauing Playlist Culture we're in. Popular songs in popular playlists which popularise each other further as the final twist of the knife in the charts usefulness.

Takes the fun out of it but there's an official playlist with all the songs over a billion streams xps

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX7iB3RCnBnN4?si=JOwwAZu9Qgalo37TZ6gXVA&utm_source=copy-link&dl_branch=1

poll?

i mean that is a grim list but it would be interesting seeing people argue their cases

The thing is, how much streams a song gets is mostly determined by how aggressively Spotify/Youtube themselves push that song into people’s play queue, their own curated playlists and search results. That’s not to say the songs aren’t loved (they clearly are big hits) but these “billion” numbers are not fully the result of conscious choices. Spotify of course has the numbers of “real clicks” but afaik there’s no way to filter out the auto-plays.

'mostly determined' makes that quite a strong and specific claim that i am not sure is accurate (perhaps closer to accurate for youtube than spotify but not comfortable agreeing either way). people do indeed use personal playlists and actually look up the things they want to listen to. i don't understand why people want so badly for it to be true that streaming is somehow more passive than more traditional media like radio and tv (??)

that tedder interview excerpt is interesting and not entirely without its points but he neglects to mention a couple important things. one is "counting stars" was without a doubt ALSO receiving far more exposure, even as a recurrent (actually industry folks would call it a 'gold'), than that more-current song at radio, i.e. the medium that adult contemporary acts like his rely on most heavily -- and one that is also becoming significantly more reliant on ever-tightening lists of old tried-and-true hits, even at supposedly currents-based formats. it is consequently 100% normal for an act's last major hit, even if it was ages ago, to be outperforming scores of their most-recent offerings -- not only in streams, but also in download sales and just about every other conceivable metric. browse currently-relevant artists' top tracks on the streaming services and you'll see just how often this is true. "counting stars" has been outperforming "run" for far longer than can be explained solely by an ephemeral tiktok thing. "counting stars" was (and therefore is) a smash. "run" appears to have been a blip at best. it didn't catch -- it happens. it happened back in the day too.

his recounting of "blinding lights's" ascent is accurate but also omits key context, namely that it was released more-or-less simultaneously with "heartless," which, at least in the states, was the main promotional focus (including at top 40) for a few months before "lights" took over. i strongly doubt that he and his team were biting their nails and panicking at its slow start. moreover, the car commercial that helped bring it to the stratosphere in europe was not just some happenstance thing that they stumbled into -- the commercial literally came out before the song itself did and the artist acted in it

Streaming is clearly not more passive than radio, but it's more passive than making the effort to buy a record and playing it - Spotify is basically a mix between "putting money in a jukebox to play what you want" and "listening to radio where the station determines what gets played next".

I mean there must be many older hits that had the equivalent of "a billion streams", i.e. the sum of (records sold x number of times played) + (played on the radio x number of listeners).

Queen has the only music before the 80s on that list and, you know what, good for them

not completely up to date but this has the 10 biggest songs by decade

https://datastudio.google.com/u/0/reporting/74cda77c-f120-40f7-932f-5cdca9d2120a/page/VrXI

Very weird results !

Indeed. One which stands out is that Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”. Peaked at #19 originally, now has 700 million+ streams, more than the streams of his three number one singles combined. No way would I have guessed that would be #1 streamed track from the 1970s.