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

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.

*1960s*

was it in a movie?

One thing I learned from that billion streams playlist: ignoring their collaboration with The Chainsmokers, Coldplay's most streamed song is 'The Scientist", which barely charted on its initial US release (#18 on the mainstream rock chart, #34 on the Adult Top 40 Chart, didn't even make the Hot 100).

Xpost

Good call, it was in “Guardians of the Galaxy” and in a key scene too.

the diana ross cover being massively successful returned attention to the song, so the relatively minor hit by motown standards made its way onto a bunch of best-of compilations

“ain’t no mountain high enough” also played a big role in remember the titans, fwiw

We've gone through some kind of paradigm shift with streaming video and video social media that comparing a songs performances on the charts back then may be like wondering why such-and-such sheet music bestseller isn't generating cover versions on the jukeboxes.

So, these are all of the 20th-century songs with a billion streams:

1. Queen, "Bohemian Rhapsody" 1.59B
2. Oasis, "Wonderwall" 1.22B
3. Queen, "Don't Stop Now" 1.13B
4. Journey, "Don't Stop Believin'" 1.12B
5. Queen, "Another One Bites the Dust" 1.09B
6. Nirvana, "Smells Like Teen Spirit" 1.06B
7. Toto, "Africa" 1.06B

Oh, and this one, which isn't yet on the BILLIONS CLUB playlist:

8. Guns N Roses, "Sweet Child O' Mine" 1.02B

We've gone through some kind of paradigm shift with streaming video and video social media that comparing a songs performances on the charts back then may be like wondering why such-and-such sheet music bestseller isn't generating cover versions on the jukeboxes.

I think this might have been an interesting discussion topic in 1955!

yeah those lists are depressing

That’s not the list that I would have expected on December 31st, 1999. I couldn’t even have put a tune to “Don’t Stop Believin” and “Africa”.

It's funny that Bohemian Rhapsody will increasingly shape what people think of "what pop music typically sounded like in 1975".

idk, I think “Bohemian Rhapsody” is pretty well established as an outlier. It’s even a plot point in the movie

Imagine if the dry run for BoRap, "The March of the Black Queen", had been released as a single and hit it big instead. Actually you'd then have the most played song on Spotify having a racial epithet in it so maybe not such a good idea. When did "Don't Stop Me Now" get so big anyway, by the way?

This seems to suggest it's use in 'Shaun if the Dead' in 2004 as a catalyst for its revival.

https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/rock/8501348/queen-dont-stop-me-now-biggest-hits

Probably a stupid question but who's getting rich off the enormous Spotify plays of Africa, Don't Stop Me Now etc? The bands? Spotify? The record companies? No one?

How the owners of the rights have divided up the revenue, that’s different for everyone.

The Spotify model is roughly like this: payout per stream is ~$0,004 so that’s $4M for a billion streams over the full lifetime of the song so far. That’s gross, but of course you don’t make a hit without some massive promotion expenses. Spotify is clearly not where you make that money back.

How much Spotify takes depends on how much you listen, ie you pay Spotify $16 per month, say you stream 600 songs a month (20 a day on avg) @ $0,004 per stream that’s $2.40 go to the owners of the rights, rest is for Spotify. Obviously, Spotify itself also has costs - last year they spent all of that cashflow (and more) on advertising/marketing themselves.

^based on how Glenn has explained it in the Spotify thread, I don’t think that’s accurate.

it would be good to hear if I’m wrong, but that’s what I see in their quarterly numbers.

None of the main current streaming services set a per-stream rate, all of them actually pay by taking ~70% of revenue for a payment period and splitting it up according to stream-shares from that period. In Spotify's case (and I assume the others), this is actually done for each payment-option in each country, so the money from US full-price premium accounts is split up according to the stream-shares from just those account-holders for that period, same for the Canadian family-plan accounts, the Belgian ad-supported accounts, etc. So this is why the actual effective rates an individual artist sees will vary both across plans and countries and over time.

Probably a stupid question but who's getting rich off the enormous Spotify plays of Africa, Don't Stop Me Now etc? The bands? Spotify? The record companies? No one?

― Vanishing Point (Chinaski), Sunday, September 5, 2021 5:30 AM (seven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Joe Rogan

ouch