A playlist of the 100 most streamed songs on Spotify. The current #1 is The Weeknd’s Blinding Lights (4.59 billion streams) followed by Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You (4.12B) and Lewis Capaldi’s Someone You Love (3.7B). Never even heard of Capaldi!
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Surprised to see only one song by Taylor Swift at number 42. Is it a factor of her having so many popular albums and song, that fewer individual songs are rising to the top?
She was off Spotify for 3 years, probably not the only factor but one of them
I recently learned from the excellent podcast "60 songs that explain the 90s" that Blinding Lights is the number 1 all time song on the Billboard Hot 100.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Billboard_Hot_100_chart_achievements_and_milestones
It's a very strange list. This was mentioned on the episode about Smooth by Santana, which is (surprisingly) #3 on the list.
Only 4 songs from the 20th century and they are not the ones I would have expected. Bohemian Rhapsody, Every Breath You Take, Smells Like Teen Spirit, and Don't Stop Believin'. Spotify is mostly a market segment of What Young Folks Are Listening To, but weird to see no Michael Jackson, no Madonna, no Beatles, no Fleetwood Mac, etc.
I, who am over 50, only made it throught two and a half songs.
I've ditched Spotify for the most part, relying on ripped CDs and Bandcamp-purchased downloads in Plex. Part of it was breaking free from quantifying things I do for pleasure, but I do beam both my Plex and my occasional Spotify listens (for things I don't own) to a free Last.fm to look at once in a while. Still paying for Spotify for the kids, though.
Surprised Jason hasn’t heard of Capaldi.
Also one thing to remember about the streams is that artists have not always been on Spotify. And ones that have labels or music publishers that aggressively block their music on YouTube and other platforms suffer in streams as young folks don’t get to hear them. Queen have pretty much never blocked and have always been on Spotify hence their popularity. Others are ties to tv shows.
Micheal Jackson stopped being relevant after his death, unless young people have older relatives that got them into him, there’s little chance they will have heard his music. It doesn’t get played much outside of oldies radio stations.
Artists or those who own rights ti their music have to put effort in making them stay relevant
God I’m not even 50 yet and this makes me feel so old.
I wonder how much plays are amplified by playlists being used by shops and other venues?
not a big fan of capaldi’s music but this moment from glastonbury in ‘23 is great. he couldn’t sing the lyrics to his number one song himself due to a tourette-attack onstage. the audience could!
https://youtu.be/u3ETc0EHQyY?feature=shared
Such a great reminder that popularity does not mean taste or quality! haha
I think of a lot of these as pool songs, as the one we belong to plays a lot of these tunes, in a rotation that repeats the most popular few every hour or so. I hadn't heard of Capaldi, but boy oh boy, I knew that tune.
It looks like this is a user-generated playlist; I got curious because there are a number of very highly-placed songs by artists that I have never encountered. I’m assuming there’s been some sort of what they would have referred to as payola back in the day since the playlist has gone viral. (I’m an Apple Music user so I don’t exactly know how it all works.)
I think it would be interesting to see an officially maintained playlist that updates dynamically. It seems like the legit entries in the list are based on this Wikipedia article.
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