Half a decade after its release on The Weeknd’s album “After Hours,” “Blinding Lights” has been crowned king of Spotify after breaking the platform’s record and becoming the first song to achieve 5 billion streams on the site on September 1.
The record was appropriately broken while the artist was on the last leg of his “After Hours til Dawn” stadium tour to celebrate the five-year-old album and his other hits. While it’s possible that the tour’s revival of the record contributed the last few streams needed to break the record, a good amount of its fame could also be owed to the perfect storm before, during and after its release: the song dropped in the midst of the rise of digital streaming, the album was most popular during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown when this streaming phase was most prominent (and for many of us, there wasn’t much else to do but put on some tunes in the background that we would never get tired of), and the album would be brought back to the public consciousness by the striking, attention-grabbing visuals of his Super Bowl performance in 2021.
So much has happened in The Weeknd’s life since the release of his biggest hit that it might even seem like a blip in the rearview mirror. Firstly, in the past few years he has grown an interest in experimenting with film and TV with the series “The Idol” and the film “Hurry Up Tomorrow”—both mixed in reviews, but still iconic on TikTok. But when it comes to the music front, he has now won four Grammy Awards (surprisingly, Blinding Lights not included), released two more albums, and he has 27 other songs that have broken 1 billion streams—more than any other artist.
So, happy 5 billion streams to the Weeknd!
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