Get Quartz in your inbox

Free daily briefing on global business news.

The 10 most streamed songs of all time on Spotify — and the stories behind them

The most streamed songs on Spotify of all time show how pop's biggest hits earned their staying power, from The Weeknd to Ed Sheeran

A song needs about four billion plays to make Spotify $SPOT -2.23%'s all-time top 10 now, a number that would have sounded like a typo a decade ago. The most streamed songs on Spotify tell two different stories depending on how they got there. Some, like a synth-heavy Weeknd single or a Harry Styles lead single, hit that scale through pure, immediate saturation: radio play, playlists, and a release cycle built for maximum reach. Others got there the slow way, picking up more streams years after release than they did in their first month, revived by a TikTok trend, a Spider-Man movie, or a wedding season that never really ends.

That mix is what makes this list useful beyond trivia. It is a rough map of how listening habits have actually changed since Spotify became the default way people hear new music. A 2012 alt-rock song about a fight in a car can now out-stream most of what topped the actual Billboard charts that year, because a platform most listeners had never opened yet turned it into an anthem for a very online generation eight years later. A ballad written by a Scottish singer nobody outside the U.K. had heard of can out-stream stadium tours, because grief and heartbreak translate across every market Spotify operates in without needing a single radio play.

Streaming numbers shift daily, so any snapshot of this list is exactly that: a snapshot. The ranking below reflects Spotify's own count of all-time streams as of September 2026, and every song on it has already crossed four billion plays, a threshold that only a handful of releases per year manage to reach at all. What follows is not just the count next to each title. It is the writing session that almost got scrapped, the sample clearance that turned into a lawsuit, the movie placement nobody predicted would outlast the movie's own soundtrack sales. Those details explain why these 10 songs, out of the tens of millions available on the platform, are the ones that never stopped getting played.

Blinding Lights by The Weeknd is Spotify's most streamed song ever

Blinding Lights has been streamed more than 5.5 billion times on Spotify $SPOT -2.23%, more than any other song on the platform. The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, released it in November 2019 as the second single from his album After Hours, and it has not relinquished the top spot on Spotify's all-time chart since.

Tesfaye wrote the song with Max Martin, one of pop's most successful songwriter-producers, and Oscar Holter, with additional production from Jason Quenneville and Ahmad Balshe. The track pulls from 1980s synth-pop, layering a driving bassline under Tesfaye's falsetto in a way that made it as recognizable on classic-rock-adjacent radio as on pop stations built for younger listeners. That crossover appeal is part of why it kept climbing charts built for entirely different audiences at once.

Its Billboard Hot 100 run set records that will be difficult for any future song to break. Blinding Lights spent 90 weeks total on the chart, 57 of them inside the top 10 and 43 inside the top five, both all-time records. In 2021, Billboard named it the number one song in the Hot 100's entire history to that point, ahead of decades-old staples like Chubby Checker's The Twist.

Part of the song's staying power on Spotify specifically comes from timing. It hit its commercial peak in the spring of 2020, just as much of the world went into pandemic lockdown and streaming became, for many people, the primary way they experienced new music at all. The song's retro, neon-lit music video and its steady use across workout and driving playlists have kept it circulating years after its initial chart run ended.

The Weeknd has had other massive Spotify hits, including Starboy and The Hills, but none has come close to matching Blinding Lights' pace. Every song on this list has needed years to accumulate its stream count. Blinding Lights reached the billion-stream mark faster than nearly any song before it and has continued adding tens of millions of streams a month, six years after its release, a pace that keeps widening its lead over Shape of You in second place.

Shape of You made Ed Sheeran give away songwriting credit

Shape of You sits at number two on Spotify $SPOT -2.23%'s all-time list with more than 5 billion streams, trailing only Blinding Lights. Ed Sheeran released it in January 2017 as the lead single from his third album, ÷, pronounced Divide, and it became one of the biggest-selling songs of that year worldwide.

Sheeran wrote the track with Steve Mac and Snow Patrol's Johnny McDaid, and he has said the song was not originally written for himself. He told BBC Radio 1 that the trio started writing it with Rihanna in mind, only switching the vocal to Sheeran partway through the session once the lyrics felt too specific to his own life to hand off.

The song's melody drew comparisons to TLC's 1999 hit No Scrubs almost immediately after release, and Sheeran's team added No Scrubs writers Kandi Burruss, Tameka Cottle, and Kevin Briggs as co-writers on Shape of You rather than contest the claim. That decision followed a pattern for Sheeran, who had already faced separate copyright disputes over his earlier songs Photograph and Thinking........

© Quartz