Play it again and again

Spotify's Billions Club tracks the world's most popular songs, but many greats are nowhere to be found. What are the forces shaping pop's new canon?

- Dorian Lynskey

In 2011, Jacob Rubeck and Nick Rattigan were living in a basement in Reno, Nevada, and thinking about starting a band. One afternoon, Rubeck came up with a Strokes-like guitar riff, Rattigan whipped up the melody and lyrics and Surf Curse's Freaks was born. "We wrote the song in like 30 minutes," the singer says.

A catchy song about alienation and longing, Freaks was released in 2013 and became a highlight of their live shows but didn't trouble the wider world until 2021, when it was discovered, out of the blue, by TikTok users. Its Spotify streams kept going up and up, until last March it passed a remarkable milestone. Unlike Bob Dylan, Pink Floyd or Prince, Surf Curse can claim membership of Spotify's Billions Club, the running playlist of every song to have achieved ibn streams. They are not sure how to feel about that.

"It's very surreal," says Rattigan. "I've ignored it to the biggest extent that I could." For Rubeck: "It feels good that a kid can see an indie-rock band from Reno, Nevada, be able to reach that - but it took a lot of weirdness to get to that point. Do you really deserve to be up there with these songs that have existed for 50 or 60 years?" Recently, I became obsessed with the Billions Club playlist and the story it tells about the nature of popularity in the streaming era. Drake's One Dance became the first song to hit a billion streams on Spotify in October 2016, but Billions Club didn't launch until June 2021, with about 150 songs. On 16 January 2025, it featured 857.