The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” is about to hit 5 billion streams on Spotify
The song is hundreds of millions of streams ahead of the competition.
They said it couldn’t be done. They said, maybe, it shouldn’t be done. But it’s about to happen: we (Spotify’s 675 million monthly active users) are about to send The Weeknd’s 2019 earworm “Blinding Lights” past the 5 billion stream mark on the platform, making it the first song in history to pass the round-number threshold.
Shut up and play the hit
As the second single from “After Hours,” The Weeknd’s fourth studio album, the song was a solid hit at the time, spending four weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 — a “respectable stay,” per Stereogum, but by no means absurd. The synth-pop track’s staying power since, on the other hand, has been frankly insane.
The song has been streamed more than 4.995 billion times, and is still clocking about 1.4 million streams a day almost six years after its release. Presuming that figure increases a little on Fridays and Saturdays, with many of The Weeknd’s tracks lending themselves nicely to, well, the weekend, “Blinding Lights” should cross the barrier over the next three days.
Wildly, another one of his tracks isn’t that far behind in the rankings either.
For a song that was first teased on a Mercedes ad on German TV one Sunday, the feats “Blinding Lights” has gone on to achieve have been remarkable. Released in November 2019, the song went on to become the biggest song of 2020 by sales and size, standing as the only song to spend a full year in the Top 10 in the US and overtaking Chubby Checker’s 1960 hit “The Twist” as the Billboards’s top Hot 100 hit of all time in 2021.
With such impressive stats behind his biggest hit, earlier song “Starboy” also breaking Spotify’s top three most streamed songs of all time, and a staggering 26 more entries with over 1 billion plays on the streamer, per Kworb figures, it’s no surprise that The Weeknd is one of the biggest stars on the platform. Only three artists — Bad Bunny, Drake, and a certain Ms. Swift — are racking up more daily streams at the moment.
