In 2011, Jacob Rubeck and Nick Rattigan were living in a basement in Reno, Nevada, and thinking about starting a band. One afternoon, Rubeck came up with a frisky Strokes-like guitar riff, Rattigan whipped up the melody and lyrics and Surf Curse’s Freaks was born. “We wrote the song in like 30 minutes,” the singer says.
A catchy song about alienation and longing, Freaks was released in 2013 and became a raucous highlight of their live shows but didn’t trouble the wider world until 2021, when it was discovered, out of the blue, by TikTok users. Its Spotify streams kept going up and up and up, until last March it passed a remarkable milestone. Unlike Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd or Prince, Surf Curse can claim membership of Spotify’s Billions Club, the running playlist of every song to have achieved 1bn streams. They are not sure how to feel about that.
“There is a lot of impostor syndrome,” says Rattigan. “It’s very surreal. I’ve ignored it to the biggest extent that I could.” For Rubeck: “Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. It feels good that a kid can see an indie-rock band from Reno, Nevada, be able to reach that – but it took a lot of weirdness to get to that point. Do you really deserve to be up there with these songs that have existed for the past 50 or 60 years?”
Recently, I became obsessed with the Billions Club playlist and the story it tells about the nature of popularity in the streaming era. Drake’s One Dance became the first song to hit a billion streams on Spotify in October 2016, but Billions Club didn’t launch until June 2021, with about 150 songs. Forbes called it music’s “new class system” and it remains fairly exclusive. On 16 January 2025, it featured 857 songs, 131 of which had ascended to the Two Billions Club and 17 to the Three Billions Club. The Four Billions Club is an intimate affair, comprising only the Weeknd’s Blinding Lights and Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You. Spotify has now made the clubs a marketing tool: earlier this month, Spotify launched a film of the inaugural Billions Club Live show with the Weeknd, to celebrate him becoming the first artist to rack up 25 entries (he has since added another).
For most of the history of popular music, it was impossible to measure the popularity of songs over time. The Top 40 told you how singles were selling in a given week, but there was no way of measuring their staying power. Album sales illustrated longevity but not which tracks were getting the most plays. Classic rock and “adult contemporary” radio established a canon but only request shows were driven by listeners. It took the emergence of transparent streaming data in the 2010s to make clear, in real time, exactly which songs people around the world were listening to.
Spotify is a facilitator rather than a bystander in this. Given that it champions certain music through opaque recommendation algorithms, editorial playlists and paid-for features that allow artists to make their music more visible, this newly forming canon is not exactly neutral. The highly public streaming metrics have their own problems – these stats are often quoted in toxic wars between stans or used to humiliate underperforming stars. But with Spotify the market leader in music streaming, these metrics are as close to a mirror of public taste as we are likely to get in an atomised online era.
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The Billions Club is now expanding exponentially, doubling in size over the past 18 months. As it grows, it will fill in some glaring omissions, but it is fascinatingly odd. Many of pop’s most familiar songs – Imagine, Jolene, Blue Monday, Get Ur Freak On – have not made it yet. The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, U2 and Abba have one song apiece. Michael Jackson, whose Thriller is the biggest-selling album of all time, has just two, as does the golden age of Motown. Roll them all together and they still have fewer entries than Imagine Dragons.
What a strange impression of pop’s history you would glean from the Billions Club. Madonna, for example, would exist only as the second featured artist on the Weeknd’s Popular; Stevie Wonder as no more than a Coolio sample; and Bob Dylan as simply the writer of an Adele hit. Beyoncé and Jackson would appear less significant than the Swedish singer Zara Larsson; Radiohead and REM would mean less to the evolution of rock than Måneskin, Italy’s winners of the 2021 Eurovision.
“When I see that a song like Bridge Over Troubled Water hasn’t passed a billion, I feel bad,” laughs Quebec singer–songwriter Patrick Watson, whose Je Te Laisserai des Mots recently became the first French-language song to hit a billion. Written for the 2009 film Mères et Filles, it is a delicate constellation of piano, cello and French crooning. “My biggest songs are usually the ones I’m not too crazy about,” says Watson. “I thought: nobody’s going to listen to this. And I was right for years.” Before it went viral on TikTok during the pandemic, it had just 1m streams. “I can’t swallow those numbers,” Watson continues. “I appreciate it, but it’s hard to own it as an accomplishment.”
The main reason for these weird numbers is that Spotify’s user base still skews relatively young, with more than three-quarters of the playlist released since the company’s US launch in 2011. After the Weeknd, the most dominant artists are Ariana Grande, Drake, Bad Bunny and Justin Bieber. The album with the most entries (seven) is Olivia Rodrigo’s Sour. The leading veterans are Coldplay and Eminem with 12 songs each, spanning more than 20 years. (No song released before 2011 has been streamed more than Coldplay’s Yellow.) Conversely, XXXTentacion, the Florida rapper who was killed in 2018 at the age of 20, released 10 billion-streamers in the space of 13 months. Appearances by Tones & I, Gotye, and Lilly Wood and the Prick prove that the one-hit wonder is alive and well.
So far, so predictable. Things get more interesting when songs predate streaming and have to rack up listeners decades after their chart heyday. The only three entries released before 1961 are Christmas songs, which are evergreen. But would you have guessed that the defining band of the 1960s, according to Spotify listeners, would be Creedence Clearwater Revival, with three of the decade’s 13 entries? Or that the fourth biggest song of the 1990s would be the Goo Goo Dolls’ anguished power ballad Iris?
The Billions Club sometimes aligns with the traditional metrics of popularity. Its leading 20th-century songs are Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody( the UK’s third biggest-selling single ever) and the Police’s Every Breath You Take (officially the most-played song in radio history). Juggernaut albums such as Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977), Guns N’ Roses’ Appetite for Destruction (1987) and Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Californication (1999) roll on, spawning three entries each. It is striking that 481 songs fall between three and four minutes long, the time-honoured radio sweet spot.
But younger listeners process the past in chaotic ways, scrambling chronology and context. 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).
However, many of pop’s biggest unit-shifters fall short when detached from their historical moment: Do They Know It’s Christmas?, Candle in the Wind ’97, (Everything I Do) I Do It for You, My Heart Will Go On, I Just Called to Say I Love You, I’ll Be Missing You, Blurred Lines. None of them is as popular as All I Want by Ireland’s Kodaline, which reached No 67 in 2013. Wet Wet Wet’s Love Is All Around, which sold almost 2m physical singles in 1994, has been consigned to the dustbin of history with a pitiful 3.6m streams.
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Like any music platform – radio, MTV – Spotify’s systemic preferences can be exploited by artists. In contrasting ways, grabby two-minute rap songs and the “muted, mid-tempo and melancholy” utilitarian background music that Spotify critic Liz Pelly calls Spotifycore both target distracted online listeners. But this doesn’t yet register at the level of the Billions Club: whenever I tripped across a name I had never heard of, there turned out to be a real-world reason for its placement.
One is that global listening figures capture the biggest regional hits, especially Spanish-language songs. Gata Only, a reggaeton hit by Chile’s FloyyMenor and Cris MJ, swept Latin America and continental Europe last summer without denting the UK Top 40. Another factor is shrewdly namechecked in Gata Only: “the rhythm of the TikTok”.
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. TikTok hits are added to Spotify’s editorial playlists and picked up by its algorithm, accelerating a snowball effect. 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). The time lag can be disorienting. By the time the Walters’ drowsy, bitter I Love You So (2014) went viral seven years later, the Chicago band had broken up and had to hastily reunite.
Most artists cannot make a living from streaming and Spotify’s publicly visible tally of their streaming numbers can be dispiriting. For members of the streaming economy’s underpaid middle class, a billion-streamer is therefore akin to a winning lottery ticket. The virality of Surf Curse’s Freaks led to their first major-label deal and a financial windfall.
“It’s dark magic,” says Rattigan. “We’re pretty lucky we got the whole song to trend. Some people only have 15 seconds.” He has an old-fashioned indie-rock suspicion of gaming the system. “One reason why these songs from 10 years ago hold so much weight is they were created out of a complete lack of awareness that they could be in that stratosphere.”
Songs erupt on TikTok because they are useful, whether structurally (a dramatic beat drop facilitates video edits) or emotionally. The platform may be new but the fundamental appeal of indie songs by the likes of Cigarettes After Sex and Beach House would be recognised by fans of doo-wop or girl groups more than 60 years ago. Like Radiohead’s Creep or Noah Kahan’s morose Stick Season, the UK’s biggest song of 2024, they are soundtracks to teenage crushes and breakups, charged with the tuneful desperation of the unloved. My daughter told me she had cried to most of them. “The reason these songs are popular is they make people feel something,” she said. “People love to be sad. And when they’re sad they don’t want to feel alone.”
One of her go-to heartbreakers is Watson’s billion-streamer, which has become a kind of emotional Esperanto, suitable for all manner of hard times. “During Covid I think people needed something that was simple and comforting,” Watson says. “There’s no bells and whistles.” The absence of context, while unhelpful in promoting his other material, has empowered this song. “A lot of music comes with the musician’s face on a billboard. Maybe this is like a person who doesn’t really exist is singing to people.”
Watson’s second-biggest song, To Build a Home (with the Cinematic Orchestra), was popularised by TV and movie syncs, another key driver of virality. Neither Kate Bush nor the Clash would be in the Billions Club without Stranger Things. Florence + the Machine’s Dog Days Are Over owes its place to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and reruns of Friends helped make With or Without You U2’s solitary entry. The Netflix show 13 Reasons Why catapulted four songs into the elite – Lord Huron’s doleful folk-rock reverie The Night We Met now somehow has more streams than Mr Brightside or Wonderwall.
To return to the Goo Goo Dolls’ Iris, its success turns out to be down to a bunch of factors: this melodrama of unrequited love was written for the Nicolas Cage movie City of Angels, hammered by radio in 1998, revived by The X Factor in 2011, discovered by TikTok in 2021, then prominently featured in Deadpool & Wolverine last year. Mystery solved.
Yet there remains something pleasingly inscrutable about mega-popularity. A song might be propelled by a TikTok craze or a TV sync, then put into heavy rotation by Spotify’s recommendation machine, but it cannot enter the rarefied realm of billions unless vast numbers of people genuinely want to hear it over and over again.
“I’ve realised that a good song is a good song,” says Rubeck. “The earworm still exists.” Watson, meanwhile, regularly hears from people who tell him that Je Te Laisserai des Mots helped them through hard times. “It’s incredible to participate in people’s lives on such a large scale,” he says. “Those are the things I keep. The rest doesn’t matter.”
