The 10 most-streamed songs of all time on Spotify

Staying power, not chart velocity, decides which tracks sit at the top of Spotify $SPOT's all-time play counts. A song can rule radio for one summer and still fall far behind the leaders here. The ranking rewards years of steady daily listening instead of a short, concentrated run. The most-streamed Spotify songs are the ones people keep returning to — on commutes, in gyms, on algorithmic playlists — long after the release cycle around them ended.

Several patterns repeat across the list. Most of these tracks arrived between 2016 and 2021. That stretch is when streaming overtook downloads and physical sales as the main way listeners consumed music, which gave these songs a large built-in audience and years of accumulation time. Many sit at the border between genres. Dancehall and Afrobeats fold into mainstream rap, electronic production pairs with confessional pop writing, and one track is a hip-hop melody written for an animated superhero film. That blending is part of why they travel across countries and listening habits.

Outside exposure counts as much as the music itself. A Super Bowl halftime slot, an Academy Award-winning animated film or a short-form video trend can each restart a song's growth years after release. So can a long run on Spotify's biggest editorial playlists. Chart dominance signals the same durability. Several of these titles spent eight, 12 or 15 weeks at number one on major national charts, which points to sustained demand rather than a one-week spike.

One caveat applies to any ranking of this kind. Spotify's totals update continuously, so the gaps between neighboring songs widen and narrow by the day, and the order below the top spot can shift. The entries here rest on documented milestones and verifiable chart history rather than a single frozen count, because any figure quoted today will be out of date within a week.

What follows are the 10 tracks that define the streaming era. Each entry covers who made it, how it charted and why listeners kept playing it long after everyone had heard it.

Illustration: Quartz

Blinding Lights is the most-streamed song in Spotify $SPOT's history and the first track on the platform to pass four billion plays, a threshold it crossed in 2023. The Weeknd released it in November 2019 as the lead single from After Hours, with production by Max Martin and Oscar Holter.

Max Martin, the Swedish producer behind decades of pop chart-toppers, shares the credit with fellow Swede Holter. The record borrows its template from mid-1980s synth-pop — a bright keyboard hook, a steady four-on-the-floor pulse and a chorus built for stadium crowds. That sound set it apart from the muted, minor-key trap-pop dominating the charts at the time. It also gave listeners outside The Weeknd's R&B following an easy entry point.

Its chart run went long by any measure. The single reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and logged 90 weeks on that chart, the longest run in Hot 100 history. Billboard ranked it first on its all-time Hot 100 list in 2021. The song also topped national charts across dozens of markets, including Canada, Australia and much of continental Europe.

Repeat exposure kept the play count climbing well after the chart cycle closed. It anchored The Weeknd's Super Bowl halftime performance in February 2021. It spread again through a widely copied dance video trend during pandemic lockdowns. And it held a long place on Spotify's biggest editorial pop playlists, where new listeners encounter it without seeking it out.

The Recording Academy left the track out of the 2021 Grammy nominations, an omission The Weeknd criticized publicly. The Academy scrapped its anonymous nomination review committees later that year. Billboard Music Awards named it Top Hot 100 Song.

Passing the previous Spotify leader took patience rather than one surge. Roughly three years of daily listening went by before Blinding Lights moved ahead of Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You." The top of this ranking rewards songs people return to over years, not the ones that peak hardest in a single quarter.

Illustration: Quartz

Shape of You sat at the top of Spotify $SPOT's all-time play counts for years, holding the position until The Weeknd's Blinding Lights moved past it. Ed Sheeran released the single in January 2017 from his album Divide, with Steve Mac producing.

The track reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and led the charts in more than 30 countries. That reach is rare even among global hits, and it explains much of why the song gathered plays at a steady rate across so many markets at once.

The production leans on a tropical house rhythm and a marimba-style hook that repeats throughout. The arrangement is spare by pop standards, which let it sit comfortably in dance playlists, workout mixes and pop radio rotations alike. The hook holds steady beneath the vocal, giving the record a loop-like quality that suits repeat listening.

Sheeran wrote the song with Rihanna in mind before deciding to keep it for himself. The lyrics, built around physical attraction and a night out, marked a shift from the acoustic, confessional songwriting of his earlier albums Plus and Multiply.

The single won Sheeran the Grammy Award for Best Pop Solo Performance. It also drew legal scrutiny. He faced a claim that parts of the track copied another writer's work, and a U.K. court ruled in his favor in 2022.

Its standing near the top of Spotify's rankings reflects timing as much as popularity. Shape of You arrived once streaming had become the main way most listeners heard new pop music, so nearly all of its consumption was logged on platforms rather than through sales. Hits from earlier decades divided their audience across physical formats, downloads and radio, leaving no single counter to capture the full total.

Years after its chart run ended, the song still appears on editorial and algorithmic playlists built around 2010s pop and dance-leaning hits. Those placements keep adding plays long after the promotional push behind Divide wrapped up.

Illustration: Quartz

Dance Monkey turned a busker into a global chart-topper. Released in May 2019 by Tones and I — the Australian singer-songwriter born Toni Watson — it spent 24 weeks at number one on Australia's ARIA singles chart, the longest run in that chart's history, and also topped the charts in the U.K. and Germany.

The track is built around a vocal that sits in an odd register, clipped and low through the verses before stretching out on the hook. That delivery is its signature. A listener can place the song within a few seconds, a useful trait when playlists are skippable and video clips run three seconds long.

Watson was performing on the street in Australia before the song broke. She has said Dance Monkey came out of watching street performers and the way crowds treat them, demanding entertainment on command. The lyric reads differently with that context: a song about being watched and expected to perform, sung by someone who had done exactly that for tips.

Its route to the top was not the standard one. Dance Monkey spread through social platforms and short-form video before radio picked it up, with clips of the chorus circulating widely and sending listeners to the full recording. Platform virality first and broadcast exposure second became a common pattern for breakout hits in the years that followed.

The song appeared on The Kids Are Coming, Watson's debut EP, released later in 2019. Topping charts across Europe and Oceania without an established international profile is rare, and it placed Tones and I among the small group of artists whose first major single became a worldwide number one.

Its standing among Spotify $SPOT's most played tracks reflects that double life. The song saturated short-form video and held a place on conventional pop playlists, which kept daily play counts high well after the initial surge. It also arrived without a prior hit or an established international fanbase behind it, which separates it from most of the other songs near the top of Spotify's all-time counts.

Illustration: Quartz

Someone You Loved is the ballad outlier among Spotify $SPOT's most played tracks — a piano-led breakup song that reached number one in both the U.K. and the U.S. Lewis Capaldi released it in November 2018, and it kept gaining listeners through most of the following year instead of peaking on arrival.

The delayed peak matters to the streaming total. The single topped the U.K. Singles Chart in spring 2019, then took until late that year to lead the Billboard Hot 100, roughly 12 months after release. A song that climbs slowly collects plays across a wider window than one that spikes and fades. The lag also gave the track time to travel from British radio to playlists in other markets.

Capaldi wrote it with the British production and songwriting team TMS — Benjamin Kohn, Peter Kelleher and Thomas Barnes — along with Samuel Roman. The arrangement stays spare throughout: a repeating piano figure, a late drum entry and a vocal pushed to the top of its range in the chorus. Capaldi's rasp carries most of the weight, which helps explain why the song works as an acoustic cover and as a standard audition piece.

It anchors his debut album, Divinely Uninspired to a Hellish Extent, the record that turned the Scottish singer-songwriter into a commercial force outside the U.K. The song won the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically, a British songwriting prize, and brought Capaldi a Grammy nomination for Song of the Year.

The music video changed how many listeners hear the lyrics. It centers on bereavement and organ donation rather than a romantic split, with Peter Capaldi cast as a widower. Framed that way, the chorus reads as grief rather than heartbreak.

Surrounded by dance-pop and rap tracks in the all-time rankings, Someone You Loved holds its position through steady repeat play rather than a short burst of attention.

Jonathan Velasquez / Unsplash

Sunflower reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and became a soundtrack song that outlasted the movie it was commissioned for. Post Malone and Swae Lee recorded it for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the animated feature that opened in December 2018 and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.

The arrangement is light and melodic rather than beat-driven. Swae Lee carries the hook in a high, airy register. Post Malone answers in a lower, conversational tone, and the two voices trade places within the first few bars. The structure stays compact, with no long build and no extended bridge, which suits a film scene and a playlist equally well.

The movie tie-in pushed the song past the audience it would have reached through radio or rap playlists alone. Families watched the film, children replayed it, and the track carried a direct association with Miles Morales, the character at the center of the story. Each new household that finds the movie on a streaming service encounters the song with it.

Sunflower earned a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year, the ceremony's top award for a single recording. The track was written for the film rather than released as the lead single of an album campaign.

The song was the first recorded collaboration between the two artists. Post Malone had already built a broad commercial profile across albums including Stoney and Hollywood's Bleeding, moving between hip-hop, pop and rock textures. Swae Lee was known mainly as one half of the duo Rae Sremmurd. Putting them on the same track placed it in front of two separate fan bases at once.

A film tie-in, two established names and a short hook built for repetition kept Sunflower accumulating plays long after Into the Spider-Verse left theaters.

Illustration: Quartz

One Dance reached one billion plays on Spotify $SPOT in 2016, the first song on the service to do so, and it got there within months of its release. Drake released it as the lead single from Views, his fourth studio album, with guest contributions from Nigerian artist Wizkid and British singer Kyla.

The track is built on a sample of "Do You Mind," a 2007 U.K. funky record by Kyla, whose vocal carries the melody rather than sitting buried in the mix. Drake layered dancehall and Afrobeats cadences over that foundation. The result sounded closer to a London club record than to the moody rap that defined much of his earlier catalog.

Kyla recorded "Do You Mind" nearly a decade before One Dance, and the sample gave a U.K. funky record its widest hearing yet.

That choice mattered beyond Drake's own career. Afrobeats already had a large audience across West Africa and in the U.K., but a limited mainstream presence in the U.S. A Drake single carrying Wizkid's voice to a global pop audience put the genre in front of millions of listeners who had never sought it out.

The single held number one on the U.K. Singles Chart for 15 weeks, a run few records in the streaming era have matched. It also topped the Billboard Hot 100, giving Drake his first number one as a lead artist after years of high placements, many of them as a featured guest on other artists' records.

Views arrived in April 2016, and One Dance outpaced every other track on the album by a wide margin.

Its staying power on Spotify owes something to arithmetic. The song appeared as streaming overtook downloads, so it has had more years to gather plays than almost anything else near the top of the platform's all-time ranking.

It also stayed useful. The track runs short, sits at a steady mid-tempo pace and slots easily between genres, which kept it on party, workout and throwback playlists long after 2016 ended.

Illustration: Quartz

Rockstar spent eight weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 after its 2017 release, one of the longest runs at the top that year. The track pairs Post Malone with Atlanta-raised rapper 21 Savage, and it later appeared on Post Malone's second studio album, Beerbongs & Bentleys, in 2018.

The production is deliberately sparse. A repeated guitar figure sits over a trap-influenced beat with long stretches of open space. The song becomes identifiable within a few seconds, and the arrangement leaves both vocalists room to carry it. That restraint is part of why it still works on playlists — there is no dense, dated arrangement tying it to a single year.

The lyrics circle fame, excess and the isolation that comes with both. Post Malone delivers them in the half-sung, half-rapped cadence that became his commercial signature. 21 Savage's verse works as a tonal contrast, flatter and more deadpan against the melodic hook.

Rockstar earned a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year, a sign of how far it had traveled beyond hip-hop audiences. It arrived after "Congratulations," the single that first established Post Malone as a mainstream chart presence, and it confirmed that his crossover reach was not a one-off. The song also reached listeners months before the album that eventually housed it, a release pattern common to streaming-era singles.

For 21 Savage, the feature ranked among the largest commercial showings of his career to that point.

The music video leaned on horror and rock imagery rather than the luxury visual language common to rap videos of the period, and it circulated widely on YouTube alongside the song's radio play.

Its standing among Spotify $SPOT's most played tracks rests on chart dominance across 2017 and 2018. A long second life on hip-hop and pop playlists followed, and the uncluttered production has kept it in rotation years after it left the charts.

Illustration: Quartz

Closer spent 12 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016, one of the longest runs of the decade. The track paired The Chainsmokers — Andrew Taggart and Alex Pall — with Halsey, who had already built a large audience through her 2015 debut album, Badlands.

What set the song apart from the rest of that year's dance-pop was its structure. Taggart sings the first verse, Halsey answers in the second, and the lyric unfolds as a conversation between two former partners who meet again years after a breakup. The details are concrete — a stolen mattress, the back seat of a Rover, a tattoo on a shoulder — and they gave the record a storyline that most club-oriented singles of the period did without.

The production stays comparatively restrained. The drop is built around a muted synth figure rather than a festival-scale buildup. That made the track playable on pop radio, in a bar, and through phone speakers, and it helped the song hold playlist positions long after its chart peak.

Closer became one of the best-selling singles of 2016 in the U.S. and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Duo/Group Performance. For The Chainsmokers, it followed Don't Let Me Down and extended a run of hits that carried the duo through the second half of the decade. For Halsey, it widened her reach well beyond the audience Badlands had drawn.

The music video, shot in a loose documentary style around a road trip, added visibility on video platforms while the single was still climbing.

Timing accounts for much of its standing among Spotify $SPOT's all-time play leaders. Closer arrived as streaming replaced downloads as the main way U.S. listeners heard new pop music. The song has been accumulating plays ever since on a platform whose listener base kept growing, and songs released even two years later began without that cushion.

Illustration: Quartz

Starboy reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2016, adding to The Weeknd's earlier chart-toppers "Can't Feel My Face" and "The Hills." The track pairs his vocals with production and backing vocals from French electronic duo Daft Punk. It is also the title song of the album he released that year.

The pairing was unusual for both acts. Daft Punk — Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo — rarely appeared as guests on other artists' records. The song arrived as the lead single in September 2016, with the full album following that November. It ranks among the last major collaborations the duo released before announcing their split in 2021. That announcement pushed listeners back through their catalog and gave the track renewed attention.

The production is spare — a clipped synth figure and a tight drum pattern, with room for Abel Tesfaye's falsetto to carry the melody. The lyrics deal in wealth, excess and self-mythology. That marks a tonal shift from the withdrawn material of his early mixtapes and much of Beauty Behind the Madness.

The Starboy album won the Grammy Award for Best Urban Contemporary Album. The era came with a deliberate reinvention as well. Tesfaye cut off the hair that had defined his earlier image, and the record's artwork and videos introduced a different visual identity.

Its standing among Spotify $SPOT's highest play counts comes down to timing and catalog behavior. Released in late 2016, it had years to gather plays before many of the platform's newer hits existed. Listeners who find The Weeknd through his later singles often work backward through his discography, and Starboy is one of the first stops they reach. It also remains a fixture of his live sets, which keeps the song in circulation rather than leaving it to sit in the archive.