ABBA’s ‘The Winner Takes It All’ Joins The Spotify Billions Club
The legendary pop group’s 1980 hit has surpassed a billion streams on Spotify.
ABBA, one of the most accomplished groups in pop history, just added to their endless list of achievements. The group’s 1980 smash “The Winner Takes It All” has surpassed a billion streams on Spotify, qualifying it for entry into the platform’s vaunted Billions Club. It’s the third ABBA song to reach the billion-stream benchmark on Spotify following “Dancing Queen” and “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight).”
“The Winner Takes It All” was the lead single from ABBA’s 1980 album Super Trouper. Group members Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson began writing the song at a cottage on the Swedish island of Viggsö in the summer of 1979, piecing together a number of prior unused ideas into a bittersweet breakup anthem. The song was a top 10 hit in the US and topped pop charts around the world, including in Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, South Africa, and the UK, where it has been voted the nation’s favorite ABBA song in multiple polls over the years.
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Ulvaeus has denied “The Winner Takes It All” is expressly about his divorce from ABBA bandmate Agnetha Fältskog, who serves as the song’s lead vocalist. “One thing I can say is that there wasn’t a winner or a loser in our case,” he told The Guardian in 2008. But he concedes that his personal situation provided fuel for such emotionally charged songwriting, even as Andersson’s addition of a French chanson piano line unlocked the song’s heartbreaking power.
In the ABBA biography Bright Lights Dark Shadows, Ulvaeus discussed Fältskog’s own reaction to first reading the lyrics: “A tear or two welled up in her eyes. Because the words really affected her.” Fältskog herself has talked about her deep emotional connection to the song, as well as her belief that it stands among ABBA’s crowning triumphs. “The lyrics are deeply personal, and the music is unsurpassed,” she said. “Singing it was like acting a part. I mustn’t let my feelings take over. It was quite a while afterwards before I realised that we’d made a small masterpiece.”
