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

Apparently "Blues From A Gun" hit #1 US Alt Rock, "Head On" at #2, "Far Gone and Out" at #3, and "Sometimes Always" at #4.

I would go so far as to say that JAMC never had anything in the US you could call a "hit" and to be honest I wouldn't even say "Just Like Honey" has risen to any kind of widespread recognition here despite its use in some popular movies. I was in college when Automatic came out, #1 "Alt Rock" it may have been but there was nobody listening to it except me.

True, and a lot of what was big on Alternative Radio then had disappeared from regular rotation and--if you were lucky--relegated to niche programming like Sunday Night "College Music" shows.

Insert "a few years later" after 'rotation'.

tbc I meant in current streaming numbers. "Just Like Honey" and "Head On" are their biggest Spotify "hits."

Surprisingly, "April Skies" is their #2 on Spotify.

jamc a perfect example of a cult band in the u.s. afaict. have still never heard them on the radio or 'out and about' yet they're a pretty common name by now. wonder how much the pixies cover plays into their stateside notoriety.

meaning: i wonder how many u.s. folks came to them via the cover.

Probably quite a few, but there were a lot of teenage hipsters like myself who knew Psychocandy very well. I remember arguments circa 1986 about who the JAMC sounded like most… my friend said the Monkees and I said The Beach Boys

probably a matter of time before By Your Side is the most played Sade tune on Spotify, already surpassed Your Love Is King

which tbh is completely reasonable

No Ordinary Love #3 on Spotify and on YT a surprise #1

such a great band

Looking at at the Velvet Underground top five on Spotify, I think it's all brunch playlist selections.

Yeah, not that they had hits, but I’d expect something like Sweet Jane to be the legacy song rather than Pale Blue Eyes.

Walk on the Wild Side still has about as many streams as the top 4-5 Velvets tracks, though, so no real upending of legacy there.

If it's brunch, it's got to be "Sunday Morning."

Ain't no brunch like a Heroin Brunch.

Pale Blue Eyes shows up on soundtracks, I guess

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Trenchant.

Yeah I've always been surprised that particular Aphex Twin track is #1

first post HoF

> Tom Waits' top song on Spotify is "I Hope I Don't Fall In Love With You", which has double the spins of runners-up "Martha", "Ol' 55", and "Hold On".

Two years later, now 3x his other Spotify tracks. Is there a soundtrack or major playlist placement? It's kinda campfire-y. Is it a Wonderwall type song now?

https://www.instagram.com/p/BYeGLvbHaid/

Ah ha

Looks like the most listened-to Anthrax song on Spotify is "Madhouse", apparently due to being on the soundtrack for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. It has 53 million plays, about a 15-million play edge over #2, their cover of "Got the Time" by Joe Jackson.

The song I expected to #1 by a long way, their version of "Bring the Noise" with Public Enemy (which was on the Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 soundtrack), is #4, with 27 million plays.

Their highest-charting U.S. single, "Only", is somewhere around the bottom of the top 10, with only (haha) about 7 million plays.

Kinda weird.

Anthrax is a weird one. I mostly associate them with “I’m the Man” which wasn’t a hit but a song everyone knew. And the only video I remember was for Indians, which kinda sucks.

"Me & Magdalena" is the 3rd biggest Monkees track on Spotify.

I mean, there's no way that happened because people actively chose to listen to it.

In my Spotify ignorance, how popular are Spotify-generated playlists? And do record labels push Spotify to put focus tracks on their Playlist?

If something like "Me and Magdalena" ends up as the 3rd most played Monkees song, the you really can't use those play counts to determine actual popularity.

Okay, “Me and Magdalena” is a fine song but really.

Is it being used in a sped up version for a tiktok meme?

I think the top playlist for many artists wouldn't be a specific playlist but the "radio" playlists/auto-play

Is it being used in a sped up version for a tiktok meme?
haha a key question indeed

Bowie's been mentioned: most of his signature songs didn't chart as well as you'd expect (and lots of huge hits have all but vanished from popular memory).

His second most-played song on Spotify is "Starman" (#10 UK, #65 US), the third-most played is "Heroes" (a borderline flop that actually hit most of its chart peaks in 2016 after Bowie died), then there's "Rebel Rebel" (#5 UK, #64 US), "Space Oddity" (#1 UK, but with a complicated release history, hitting its high-water mark five years after it first appeared), and "Moonage Daydream" (never released as a single, at least not under the Bowie name).

Not present are "Dancing in the Streets" (#1 UK, #7 US), "China Girl" (#2 UK, #10 US) "Ashes to Ashes" (#1 UK), "Fame" (#17 UK, #1 US), "The Jean Genie" (#2 UK, #71 US), "Golden Years" (#8 UK, #10 US), "Blue Jean" (#6 UK, #8 US).

(His most-played song by a huge margin is "Under Pressure", which I'm ignoring because of crosstalk with the Queen name/brand).

And for what it's worth "Breathe"/"Firestarter"/"SMBU" are all basically neck and neck on Spotify.

I mean, there's no way that happened because people actively chose to listen to it.

I get the impression there's plenty of genuine affection for the song. eg. there was a live cover of it on an TV program recently on my side of the world, in a segment that leans towards to safe, tasteful choices, if not outright 'standards'.

In my Spotify ignorance, how popular are Spotify-generated playlists? And do record labels push Spotify to put focus tracks on their Playlist?

Essentially streaming stats are a combination of the old sales charts and airplay charts. Only the streaming sites themselves know how the numbers break down of course.

The fourth highest played track on Spotify by the Lovin' Spoonful is "(Till I) Run With You", the sorta title track from their post-Sebastian album.

Essentially streaming stats are a combination of the old sales charts

if you remove all aspects of sales and remuneration

xpost Used in a tv show last year, I guess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjfbZtP9uHU

streaming stats are a different animal entirely because, to my understanding, it's the total number of times a song's been played since the day the streaming service started tracking streams. maybe some of the services reset or baseline the numbers occasionally, but I haven't heard of it

so sales charts tracking how many copies an album's sold since the day it was released might be a point of comparison, but that's still off. radio charts are plays per what, a week/month/year, and nearly all songs that were released as singles?

I mean a combination of sales as in, something activey initiated by the listener, and airplay as in, something pushed onto the listener.

a really cool spotify mod/feature would be if you could change the default artist view from highlighting most streamed songs to highlighting "best" songs, as in, songs preferred by fans most acquainted with said artists catalog (or smth)

with over 62m streams "when the sun hits" is slowdive's biggest song on spotify, beating "alison" handily.

Not sure that counts, as such. Slowdive never had any hits. More than 99% of people would never have heard of them, and of those (like me) who are/were fans, I don't think many would be able to confidently say "*this* is their biggest tune" about any of them. I would have had absolutely no idea what the number one would have been.

Strangely enough it seems Renegade is the big audience favourite rather than Come Sail Away or Mr Roboto or whatever, certainly at the Northern Wisconsin State Fairgrounds.

Read this with disbelief and went straight to Apple Music, where, indeed, Renegade is Styx's most streamed song! What on earth? I wouldn't have guessed it was in the top 5.

(oh sorry that post is from the Kansas thread, not this one)

"Renegade" was/is a huge Classic Rock radio staple, mainly because it's one of the only big Styx songs in hat actually rocks out.

The opening lines are like the definition of Classic Rock

It hits this spot right in the middle of Queen and Bon Jovi

Honestly yeah the inbred-looking extended family of Wisconsonites in the row in front of us all went "yissss!", pumped their fists and began filming on their phones when Tommy Shaw sang the opening lines.

Also the 3rd best utilization of Styx on Freaks and Geeks.