Akon’s ‘Lonely’ Joins The Spotify Billions Club
The singer’s 2005 smash has accumulated more than a billion plays on the streaming platform.
“Lonely” is Akon’s newest entry in the Spotify Billions Club. The Senegalese-American singer’s 2005 smash has surpassed 1one billion streams on Spotify, the world’s leading streaming platform. It’s Akon’s third song to join the Billions Club—and his first solo track—following his collabs with David Guetta and Eminem, “Sexy Bitch” and “Smack That.”
Appearing on Akon’s 2004 debut album Trouble, “Lonely” was released as a single in February 2005, becoming his breakthrough hit. Akon co-produced it with Benny-D, Knobody, Shakim Williams, and Disco D, building it out of a sample from crooner Bobby Vinton’s 1964 chart-topper “Mr. Lonely.”
Akon’s song pitched up the sample of Vinton’s voice a la Alvin and the Chipmunks, a style that gained traction in the mid-2000s thanks to producers like Kanye West and Just Blaze. The idea to flip “Mr. Lonely,” though, was Akon’s alone; only Akon and “Mr. Lonely” writers Vinton and Gene Allan are credited as songwriters on “Lonely.”
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Not only was “Lonely” the song that made Akon a fixture of 2000s pop music, it’s the song that first caught the attention of SRC Records A&R rep Jerome Foster, aka the song’s co-producer Knowbody, earning Akon his record deal with the Universal imprint. In a 2005 Hit Quarters interview, Foster said he immediately flew to Atlanta to meet Akon upon hearing the “Lonely” demo.
“I was extremely lonely when I wrote it – true story,” Akon told NME in 2023. “At the time, the only person who had my back was no longer there for me because of mishaps and decisions of my own. But for me, writing a song like this is a form of therapy. Once I get it out, I feel so much better. I feel even better again when I see other people can relate to it too.” Clearly, people are still relating to it more than two decades later.
