The Biggest Surprises in Streaming

Today’s episode and memo are about the biggest surprises in streaming. If you look at the Spotify stream counts or YouTube views for enough songs, you’ll see some shockers. Why does a song that was a smash hit in its heyday have fewer streams than a song that you forgot the name of? Why does one of the most watched YouTube music videos of all time perform just modestly on Spotify?

We dug into the data whole episode on these types of instances. You can listen to me and Zack O’Malley Greenburg here, read his piece on the topic here, and read below for a few highlights.

This was a nerd-corner episode and I have no shame. Who else doesn’t love to analyze play counts for songs from YouTube and Spotify in their spare time??

If you’ve been listening to Trapital for a while, you’ll remember our Billions Clubs episode. We analyzed the songs on Spotify and music videos on YouTube with over a billion plays. The results said a lot about each platform’s strengths, and weaknesses, and how they shape the strategies of labels, artists, and all the stakeholders tied to music.

We rarely hear about the “billions clubs” from other music streaming services though. Frankly, very few of their songs have crossed that threshold! Spotify and YouTube’s promotion of these milestones is a flex onto itself. It’s a bit unfair, admittedly, to compare a freemium music platform to a paid-only service, but for better or worse, this is the reality.

I picked five surprises for our episode. One of them was the steady rise on Spotify of The Killer’s “Mr. Brightside.” The song was a slow burn from the mid-2000s that came up with a pack of alt-rock songs, like Franz Ferdinand’s “Take Me Out” and Yeah Yeah Yeah's “Maps.”

But “Mr. Brightside” separated from the pack to become the fourth-most streamed song on Spotify from the 2000s. With nearly 2.5 billion streams, it only sits behind Coldplay's “Yellow,” Eminem's “Without Me,” and Coldplay's “Viva La Vida” for the most streamed Spotify songs from the decade.

For a certain demographic of millennials, “Mr Brightside” is their “Sweet Caroline.” It’s their nightcap sing-a-long right before the last call at the bar. It’s their anthem that takes a wedding reception to another level. And as a University of Michigan grad, it’s the song that signifies the Jim Harbaugh era. A song about “cheating” might signify the Harbaugh era a little too well, but let’s just leave that there for now!

To call the song a sleeper hit, though, might reflect some regional bias. The Las Vegas-based band broke in the U.K. before they broke in the U.S. They followed the strategy of pushing alternative music to more experimental markets before it hit the States for more commercial appeal. The strategy paid off. The song was a critical and commercial juggernaut in Britain throughout the 2010s, long before Spotify rose to power.

That dominance has continued, especially in the U.K. “Mr. Brightside” is the #1 most-streamed song overall on Spotify in the U.K. with 370 million streams. In the U.S., it’s the 39th most-streamed song, and the 52nd most-streamed globally on Spotify.

For “Mr. Brightside” or any of the streaming surprises we discussed on our show, they normally track with a few trends:

- songs that broke in the other markets before they broke in the US
- songs that match the Spotifycore sound—chill, mid-tempo, lean-back listening
- older songs that went viral on social media
- songs that are bigger (or smaller) hit in my algorithm-driven bubble
- songs that aged poorly over time

“Mr. Brightside” fits into the first bullet and maybe the fourth since they are connected. I wouldn’t call the song “Spotifycore” or hinge its success on a viral sensation, but plenty of the other songs we discussed fit in that category.

That said, “Mr. Brightside” and its Spotify strength haven’t translated to YouTube! The music video has 586 million views and just 91,290 plays daily. That’s fewer YouTube views, total and daily, than 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” a song that came out the same year as The Killer’s generational hit. Meanwhile on Spotify, 50 Cent’s hit has just 27 percent of the streams that “Mr. Brightside” has.

The data is always revealing! You should listen to the rest of our episode for our takes on:

- other other streaming surprises
- Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” popularity outside of the U.S.
- Workout music, playlisting, TikTok, and other trends that shape our listening habits

Listen here: ​Apple​ | ​Spotify​ | ​Overcast

Chartmetric Stat of the Week

Kanye West’s Heartless surpassed Stronger as his most-streamed song on Spotify after some explosive growth in recent years. In May 2023, Heartless had around 750 million total streams on Spotify—less than half of what it has today. Currently, the song racks up over 1.1 million daily streams on Spotify, far outpacing Stronger at 630,000. It's the "old Kanye" song that keeps on moving.