(Credits: Far Out)
Sun 21 December 2025 22:00, UK
The main reason I’m starting to believe more and more that Spotify Wrapped is a fix is that every year, without fail, it tries to tell me that ‘Here Comes the Sun’ by The Beatles is one of my top tracks.
Listen, this is not a suggestion of slandering the Fabs, nor an attempt to start a baseless conspiracy theory, but it does stand to reason that the offending song in question is the only Beatles tune with over one billion streams on Spotify. I really don’t think I listen to it that much to be one of my top tracks year on year, so is it a plant?
Who’s to say, but the fact remains that for a single song to receive over one billion streams, it must be life-alteringly seismic. It’s a surprise that ‘Here Comes the Sun’ is the only Beatles contender in this respect. Yet in doing so, they join a league of bona fide rock billionaires on Spotify, quite literally taking over the world with the power of their massive hits.
There are the obvious additions of tunes that everyone on Earth seems to know from the second they take their first breath. ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ by Guns N’ Roses, ‘Hotel California’ by the Eagles, ‘Highway to Hell’ by AC/DC – the list goes on. There’s also the ones that the bands themselves would rather be wiped from the face of history (‘Creep’ by Radiohead, if it wasn’t already painfully clear).
Some are perhaps more surprising examples, such as ‘Zombies’ by The Cranberries or ‘Fortunate Son’ by Creedence Clearwater Revival, not because you haven’t heard of the songs or artists, but because they’re maybe not the immediate names that crop up when it comes to discussions on the greatest classic rock acts of all time. But one track was enough to see them sailing through.
Which artist has the most songs over a billion streams on Spotify?
But through it all, there is one band that miraculously appears more than most. Sure, there are a couple of double additions from the likes of The Red Hot Chilli Peppers, Nirvana, and Metallica, but beating them all by an absolute country mile is Queen, with a huge five songs surpassing the billion streams mark.
‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ is the obvious contender for this crown, but it is followed hot on the heels by ‘We Will Rock You’, ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’, ‘Another One Bites the Dust’, and ‘Under Pressure’, and while we all know Queen as one of the biggest bands to have ever graced the Earth, seeing how their music has racked up this much world-beating acclaim is really something to stop you in your tracks.
Despite this, it does still beg the question of exactly how they have achieved this stratospheric feat, and this is especially the case when you consider the fact that bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd don’t even get a look in, but it seems that timing is everything, whether through accidental success or a meticulously crafted plan.
Whether you like it or absolutely loathe it, the 2018 biopic Bohemian Rhapsody has done a lot of heavy lifting in terms of opening up Queen to a younger audience, most dominant in the streaming era. It was reported that over 70% of their streams came from people under 35 after the film hit the screen. It proves that for better or worse, the new generation really are the future.
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