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No Dylan but loads of Coldplay! What the songs with a billion streams on Spotify tell us about music taste today
Spotify’s Billions Club tracks the world’s most popular songs, but dozens of greats are nowhere to be found. From TikTok to TV soundtracks, we explore the forces shaping pop’s new canon
Rock (with a marked American bias) is surprisingly enduring, from AC/DC to nu-metal; turn-of-the-millennium pop-rock hits such as Smash Mouth’s All Star and Jimmy Eat World’s The Middle sit alongside uncharacteristic US breakthroughs from Radiohead (Creep) and Blur (Song 2). By the time the Walters’ I Love You So went viral, the band had broken up and had to hastily reunite During the 2020–21 lockdown, the video sharing platform began incubating numerous surprising obsessions with songs old and new, completely divorced from the usual machinery of promotion and radio play. This explains such puzzling Billions Club members as young artists whose names read like fragments of automated passwords (d4vd, JVKE) and indie-rock records that took off years after release, including Lovers Rock by TV Girl (2014), Space Song by Beach House (2015) and Apocalypse by Cigarettes After Sex(2017).
Or read this on The Guardian
