Billions of Streams: Data About Spotify's Most Streamed Songs
📈 I collected data for
404 songs that have gathered over 1 billion streams
on the Spotify music streaming platform.
📊 Visualize key pieces of data about some of the most popular songs in
today's culture.
✅ You'll find visuals here for data such as release date, genre, song length,
key of the song, tempo, as well as interesting data about the lead artist for
each song.
→ Some of the data points are for the lead artist. In most cases the selected lead artist is the song's lead vocalist. In some cases when the song's vocalist isn't credited, the lead artist is the song's producer. For example, Avicii is the lead artist for the song Wake Me Up.
In cases where there's no obvious lead vocalist, I went ahead and picked one. For example, for the Backstreet Boy's I Want It That Way, I picked AJ McLean as the lead artist.
→ This page reflect streaming data available publicly from Spotify as of May, 2023.
→ The data was collected using the following publicly available sources:
Data at a Glance
Here are some key highlights from the 404 songs that have been streamed over a billion times. Almost all of these songs are found in the Billions Club playlist:
- Together, these songs have gathered 568.651 billion streams. That's over half a trillion streams. 🤯
- Have You Ever Seen The Rain by Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR), released on January 1971, is the oldest song to receive over a billion streams.
- Ojitos Lindos by Bad Bunny and Bomba Estéreo , released on February 14, 2023, is the latest song to receive over a billion streams, followed by Miley Cyrus' Flowers.
- The shortest song is Hope by XXXTentacion, at 1:50, and the second shortest song is Jocelyn Flores, also by XXXTentacion, at 1:59.
- The longest song is Te Boté (Remix) by Nio Garcia, Casper Magico, Bad Bunny, Darell, Ozuna and Nicky Jam, at 6:57, followed by the second longest song, Hotel California by the Eagles, at 6:31.
- 23 songs (5.7%) are in Spanish, 1 song (Boy With Luv) is in Korean and the remaining 380 songs (94%) are in English.
- 95 songs (23.5%) are from female lead artists while the remaining 309 songs (76.5%) are from male lead artists.
- 31 songs (7.7%) have been streamed over 2 billion times.
- 2 songs have been streamed over 3 billion times: Shape of You by Ed Sheeran and Blinding Lights by The Weeknd.
- The song with the fastest tempo is Starboy by The Weeknd and Daft Punk, at 186 BPM.
- The song with the slowest tempo is Earned It, also by The Weeknd, at 40 BPM.
- 27 songs (6.7%) are from lead artists that have passed away.
- 224 songs (55.4%) are from lead artists that originate from the U.S.
- 74 songs (18.3%) are from lead artists that originate from England.
Stream Counts & Release Dates
Visualize the number of streams (in billions) on the Y axis and the release date on the X axis for all 404 songs. Hover over any of the dots for the song name, artist(s), number of streams and exact release date.
Artists with Most Streams
Here's the top 20 lead artists that have the most amount of streams.
This represents the aggregated number of streams in billions from the set of 404 songs, not the total number of streams for all songs from each artist.
Country of Origin
Lead artists originate from 26 different countries. 55.4% of the songs are from lead artists originating from the U.S., with 18.3% of the songs from lead artists originating from England and 9.4% from lead artists originating from Canada.
I included Puerto Rico as part of the U.S, but on it's own 17 songs are from artists originating from Puerto Rico, or 4.2% of the total number of songs and 7.6% of the songs from artists originating from the U.S.
This world map shows a visual for these countries, by number of songs from a lead artist originating from that country. ↓
State of Origin
Of the 224 songs that are from lead artists originating from the U.S., 61.4% of the songs are from lead artists originating from 6 states and territory.
- California: 48 songs, 21.52% of total
- New York: 23 songs, 10.31% of total
- Florida: 21 songs, 9.42% of total
- Puerto Rico: 17 songs, 7.62% of total
- Georgia: 15 songs, 6.73% of total
- Texas: 13 songs, 5.83% of total
Age at Time of Release
The average age of lead artists at the time of song release is 26.5 years old. The X axis in the following histogram represents age, and the Y axis represents the number of songs.
Billie Eilish was 14 when ocean eyes was released.
Elton John was 74 when Cold Heart was released.
Gender Distribution
A larger percentage of songs that have over a billion streams on Spotify are from male lead artists (76.5%) than from female lead artists (23.5%):
Language Distribution
94% of the songs have English lyrics. 23 songs (5.7%) have Spanish lyrics and one song has Korean lyrics (Boy With Luv by BTS).
Band, Solo or Collab
44.7% of the songs are from a solo artist, 22.3% of the songs are from a band and 33% of the songs are from a collaboration between multiple artists/bands.
Key Quality
48.5% of the songs are in a major key, 47.5% are in a minor key and 4% are using one of the modes of the major scale.
Genres
A bubble chart that shows the different musical genres for the 404 songs and how often they come up.
Song Length
The average song duration is 3:39 and here's an histogram that shows the distribution of song durations.
Song Tempo
The average song tempo is 113.7 beats per minute (BPM) and here's an histogram that shows the tempo distribution in BPM.
Release Year
Release Month
Release Year in Detail
A dot plot where each song is a dot. You can hover over the dots to get the song name and release year:
Major Keys
The most popular major keys are D major, A♭ major, G major and C major. Here's the breakdown for songs that are in a major key:
Minor Keys
The most popular minor keys are A minor, G minor, C# minor, F# minor and E minor. Here's the breakdown for songs that are in a minor key:
Lead Artists Who've Passed Away
27 songs are from 12 lead artists who have now passed away.
- George Michael
- Bon Scott (AC/DC)
- Avicii
- XXXTentacion
- Juice WRLD
- Coolio
- Ronnie Van Zant (Lynyrd Skynyrd)
- Chester Bennington (Linkin Park)
- Michael Jackson
- Kurt Cobain (Nirvana)
- Maurice White (Earth, Wind & Fire)
- Freddie Mercury (Queen)
