Most Streamed Songs on Spotify (2026)

Data

💡 Note: How Spotify Stream Counts Work

Spotify is a Swedish audio streaming service that launched in 2008 and has grown into the world's largest music streaming platform, with hundreds of millions of monthly active users and more than 100 million songs in its catalogue. The chart above shows the songs that have accumulated the most plays in Spotify's history, a title that has quietly become one of the most coveted records in modern music.

How a stream is counted

• Spotify counts a play as a stream toward royalties once a listener has listened for roughly 30 seconds. Skips before that mark do not generate a royalty payment, which is why short previewers are not counted.
• Both free (ad-supported) and Premium plays count toward the total, although the two tiers pay different royalty rates to rights holders.
• The numbers on this page are cumulative all-time counts, so they grow every single day as people keep listening to old hits. A song in this list will almost certainly be higher by the time you read this.
• Playlists are the engine of the whole system. Being added to editorial playlists like Today's Top Hits, or to giant algorithmically generated playlists, can add millions of daily plays to a song.

History of the record

• Drake's "One Dance" made history in October 2016 as the first song ever to pass 1 billion streams on Spotify.
• Ed Sheeran's "Shape Of You" was the first song to pass 2 billion streams, and later the first to pass 3 billion.
• The Weeknd's "Blinding Lights" took over the number one spot in early 2021, ending "Shape Of You"'s reign, and it has not left since. It became the first song to pass 4 billion (in 2024) and then 5 billion streams (in 2025).
• Its lead looks safe for a while: "Blinding Lights" sits about 0.5 billion streams ahead of the runner-up, a gap that takes even top-tier hits roughly a year to close.
• The most recent arrivals in the top 25, "Die With A Smile" (Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars) and "Birds of a Feather" (Billie Eilish), both from 2024, are the fastest risers, reaching the top 25 within about two years of release.

Fun facts from the top 25

• Ed Sheeran is the only artist with two songs in the top 10: "Shape Of You" at number 2 and "Perfect" at number 9.
• The Weeknd also appears twice in the top 10, with "Blinding Lights" and "Starboy" (featuring Daft Punk). A third Weeknd-adjacent entry, "One Of The Girls" with Jennie and Lily-Rose Depp, sits just outside the top 25.
• The oldest song in the top 25 is "Every Breath You Take" by The Police, released back in 1983. A 40-year-old rock track ranking among the most-played songs on a modern streaming platform shows how playlists and algorithm radio keep catalogue music alive.
• "Sweater Weather" by The Neighbourhood is the ultimate sleeper hit. Released in 2013, it barely charted at the time, then spent more than a decade slowly climbing through playlists before reaching the top 3 around 2025.
• Several entries were late bloomers boosted by social media: "Heat Waves" (Glass Animals), "Another Love" (Tom Odell) and "505" (Arctic Monkeys) all found huge second lives through TikTok and short-form video.
• British artists dominate the list, with Ed Sheeran, Harry Styles, Lewis Capaldi, Coldplay, Arctic Monkeys, Tom Odell and James Arthur all representing the UK in the top 25.

What the numbers mean in money

Per-stream payouts vary by country, subscription tier and label agreement, but a commonly cited average is around 0.3 to 0.5 US cents per stream. At that rate, a song with 5 billion streams has generated somewhere in the range of 15 to 25 million dollars in gross royalties for its rights holders. The artists themselves typically receive a fraction of that after their label, publisher and managers take their shares, which is why artists have long campaigned for higher streaming royalty rates.

Why this chart matters

Streaming now accounts for the vast majority of recorded music revenue worldwide, so the all-time stream count has effectively replaced album sales as the clearest measure of a song's popularity. These 25 songs represent roughly 100 billion plays between them, a figure that would have been unthinkable in the physical and download eras. The list will keep changing, and the next record-breaker is probably being looped on a playlist somewhere right now.