The Weeknd’s ‘Blinding Lights’ Is The First Song With Five Billion Spotify Streams
The biggest hit in Billboard Hot 100 history has released a new streaming milestone.
The Weeknd is one of the most popular and successful artists of the streaming era, and his biggest hit “Blinding Lights” just reached a new milestone on Spotify, surpassing five billion streams on the platform. It’s the first song in Spotify history to cross over five billion listens.
Racking up a billion streams of one track is the kind of achievement most artists can only dream of, but the artist born Abel Tesfaye has 28 such billion-stream songs within Spotify alone. “Blinding Lights,” meanwhile, has quintupled that feat. It’s one of only five songs to have crossed over the 4 billion streams mark, Notably, the Weeknd accounts for two of those five tracks with “Blinding Lights” and “Starboy,” his chart-topping Daft Punk collab from 2016.
In 2021, Billboard named “Blinding Lights” the biggest hit in the history of the Hot 100. “The track reigns thanks to a record 57-week run in the Hot 100’s top 10 from February 2020 through April 2021, including four weeks at No. 1,” the magazine’s Hot 100 scholar Gary Trust wrote recently. “It also logged a record, and staggering, 86 weeks in the chart’s top 40.” Tesfaye told Billboard in 2021 that the success of “Blinding Lights” had not fully hit him yet: “I try not to dwell on it too much. I just count my blessings, and I’m just grateful.”
The Weeknd’s latest streaming milestone arrives alongside an extensive reissue campaign celebrating his 2015 album Beauty Behind the Madness. The new slate of releases includes LP and LP picture disc versions of the album, as well as three 7-inch singles. The album yielded Tesfaye’s first two No. 1 hits, “Can’t Feel My Face” and “The Hills,” and cemented his place as one of the superstars of his generation.
