Spotify Wrapped season has come and gone, but if you still want the vicarious thrill of seeing what tracks other people are listening to, keep reading. We dug into Spotify’s usage statistics to find the most-streamed songs of all time, which are presented below in descending order.
(Credit: PCMag)
At the top of the list, with 4.21 billion streams, is a song that owes a lot to TikTok and the pandemic, “Blinding Lights” by The Weeknd. It served as the soundtrack for a TikTok dance challenge in March 2020, occupying hours of indoor practice around the world. It was Spotify’s top song of the year then, and still holds that spot today (though it has had its ups and downs). Aside from its Spotify status, the song has been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America and is the Billboard Hot 100’s top song of all time.
Coming in at number two with 3.87 billion streams is Ed Sheeran’s “The Shape of You.” Though he wrote it (along with Steve Mac and Johnny McDaid), he did not plan to sing it himself. Instead, he had originally conceived the song as being performed by Little Mix and then Rihanna, but ultimately decided he should keep it, adding acoustic guitars and some more flow to it. Among many other awards and accolades, the song earned Sheeran a Grammy for Best Pop Solo Performance.
Another redhead from the UK holds down the third-place spot after Sheeran. Lewis Capaldi’s “Someone You Loved” has 3.36 billion streams and also comes with some firsts: it’s his first hit on his first album. It’s a very personal song to Capaldi, who wrote it about the death of his grandmother, and had his distant cousin and the Twelfth Doctor, Peter Capaldi, star in a video for it.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse was a gift in and of itself but it also freed us from a Spider-Man soundtrack record that held on for too long. “Sunflower” by Post Malone and Swae Lee made things sticky for Chad Kroeger of Nickelback, surpassing his “Hero” from 2002’s Spider-Man to become the highest-charting song from a Spider-Man film. It has 3.3 billion streams on Spotify (far surpassing Hero’s 104 million).
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Though “Starboy” by The Weeknd and Daft Punk sources its name from the celestial, it has The Weeknd’s very earthly pursuits of car collecting at the heart of its lyrics and video. It features many of his own cars, including his own McLaren P1 (which bears the name STARBOY on its license plate), and has been streamed 3.22 billion times worldwide.
Rounding out the list is Harry Styles with “As It Was” (3.2 billion streams), Drake with “One Dance” (3.13 billion streams), The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber with “Stay” (3.05 billion streams), Tones and I with “Dance Monkey” (3.04 billion streams), and Imagine Dragons with “Believer” (2.96 billion streams).
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