Blinding Lights milestone

The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” has become Spotify’s most-streamed song ever, extending a record it first claimed in late 2022. (billboard.com) Spotify’s all-time rankings now put “Blinding Lights” ahead of Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You,” the song it passed in December 2022. By August 31, 2025, it had become the first track on the platform to reach 5 billion streams. (musicbusinessworldwide.com, billboard.com) The song was released on November 29, 2019, as the second single from The Weeknd’s album *After Hours*. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. (thefader.com, billboard.com) Its chart run lasted far longer than a typical pop hit. Billboard said the track spent a record 57 weeks in the Hot 100 top 10 and 86 weeks in the top 40, helping it top the publication’s all-time Hot 100 ranking in November 2021. (billboard.com, variety.com) Streaming gave the song a second life after radio and chart peaks passed. Sherwood reported in August 2025 that “Blinding Lights” was still drawing about 1.4 million Spotify streams a day nearly six years after release. (sherwood.news) The track’s timing also fixed it to a specific moment in pop culture. *After Hours* arrived in March 2020, the same week “Blinding Lights” hit No. 1, as pandemic shutdowns were spreading across the United States and Europe. (thefader.com) Industry accolades piled up alongside the streams. The Recording Industry Association of America certified “Blinding Lights” diamond in April 2022, meaning 10 million units in the United States under the group’s formula for sales and streams. (billboard.com) Fans on X treated the latest Spotify milestone as a nostalgia marker as much as a numbers story, with posts describing the song as a defining soundtrack of the early pandemic years. The record now stands as a measure of how a 2019 single kept growing long after its first chart run ended. (x.com, x.com)