“Blinding Lights” Becomes First Song To Hit 5B On Spotify

Key Takeaways:

• “Blinding Lights” broke records as the first song to surpass 5 billion streams on Spotify.
• The Weeknd acknowledged the achievement during his “After Hours Til Dawn 2025 Stadium Tour.”
• His catalog now includes 28 songs in Spotify’s Billions Club, showcasing his sustained global appeal.

The Weeknd sure knows how to put up numbers. On Sunday (Aug. 31), Spotify announced that the Grammy-winning singer’s “Blinding Lights” became the first song ever to surpass 5 billion streams on the platform.

The singer, currently on his massive “After Hours Til Dawn 2025 Stadium Tour,” celebrated the news with a simple repost on his Instagram Stories. The feat comes nearly six years after “Blinding Lights” was released as the second single from 2019’s After Hours.

At the time, the record spent four non-consecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and made history as the first song to stay in the Top 10 for an entire year, which is pretty impressive to say the least.

Last year, The Weeknd spoke with Billboard about “Blinding Lights” hitting the 4 billion mark. “I’ll never stop being humbled by anything I create making its way to millions of people, let alone billions,” he shared. “I’m so thankful this song makes people feel a way that they keep going back to listen.”

“Blinding Lights” may have been The Weeknd’s first track to surpass a billion streams, but it’s far from the only one. In fact, he now has 28 songs in the billion-streams club, including “The Hills,” “After Hours,” and “Can’t Feel My Face.”

So, it was only fitting that the Dawn FM singer headlined Spotify’s first-ever Billions Club Live in 2024, where he had closed the year as the platform’s second-most-streamed artist. “When the idea first struck to bring the Billions Club to life, we knew we wanted to celebrate both the artist and the fans simultaneously,” the streaming service’s head of artist and label partnerships, Monica Damashek, shared.

She added, “The Weeknd was the ideal choice — he’s the artist with the most songs in the Billions Club and has an unwavering global fanbase.”