When a song becomes a phenomenon, it’s easy to think the artist who made it will forever be associated with it. For the most part, that assumption has held up pretty well for rock’s most popular artists. Five decades after it dominated FM rock radio, “Stairway to Heaven” is still Led Zeppelin’s signature song. Its more than 980 million streams on Spotify—the most for any Led Zeppelin track—confirms that status. “Jump” still stands as Van Halen’s most listened-to song in the streaming era, and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” reigns as Nirvana’s most-popular song on Spotify, just to cite a couple more examples.
Sometimes a scan of a popular artist’s top tracks on Spotify creates some cognitive dissonance, especially for those of us who have paid attention to the Billboard charts. Regarding the three artists featured here, learning which song is their most popular might not be a shock to some, since the songs have gained enough fans over time to warrant that top ranking. However, if your strongest memories of these artists are from a previous decade, you may be surprised to learn the songs that were at one time their biggest commercial successes have been supplanted as their most popular, at least on Spotify.
“Starman” by David Bowie
The Top-10 rankings of Bowie’s songs on Spotify are strewn with well-known classics, but his biggest chart hit “Fame” is nowhere to be found. His other chart-topping single, “Let’s Dance,” sits at No. 5. At the top of the list is his 1981 duet with Queen, “Under Pressure.” The song has grown in stature over time, but it wasn’t even in Bowie’s Spotify Top 5 just prior to the 2018 release of the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Even if we take the recent surge in Queen’s popularity out of the equation, there is a surprise at the top of the rankings.
“Starman” trails “Under Pressure” by more than 1 billion streams, but it is currently Bowie’s most popular solo track on Spotify. Though it was the lead single from Bowie’s legendary 1972 album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, “Starman” only went as far as No. 65 on the Billboard Hot 100. As the stature of Ziggy Stardust grew over the course of Bowie’s career, so did the reputation of its most popular single.
Still, it wasn’t until Bowie’s death that “Starman” became arguably his most popular song. On Jan. 9, 2016, the day before Bowie’s death, “Heroes” (yet another sleeper hit) was Bowie’s top song on Spotify, and “Starman” was not among the Top 5. Less than three months later, “Starman” had climbed to No. 4, and by November 2016, it had slotted behind “Heroes” as Bowie’s No. 2 track on Spotify. As recently as two years ago, “Heroes” still had 55 million more streams than “Starman.” Perhaps being used in the 2022 movie Glass Onion helped “Starman” to build on its momentum. As of this writing, it has been streamed more than 512 million times on Spotify, holding less than a 6 million stream lead over “Heroes.”
“Solsbury Hill” by Peter Gabriel
“Sledgehammer” was Gabriel’s commercial breakthrough, and when it was topping the Hot 100 in the summer of 1986, it was inescapable. With more than 134 million streams, it is Gabriel’s second-most streamed song on Spotify. However, Gabriel’s first-ever single after leaving Genesis, “Solsbury Hill,” has more than doubled that total. While “Solsbury Hill” is now generally considered to be Gabriel’s signature song, it was a minor hit upon its 1977 release. It peaked at No. 68 on the Hot 100 and only reached the Top 20 in the UK, Germany, and the Netherlands. While it never had much currency as a pop hit in the U.S., “Solsbury Hill” was played more frequently on rock stations once Gabriel became more popular in the ‘80s.
Though it has a long way to go to catch up to “Solsbury Hill” (currently at 288 million-plus streams), “Sledgehammer” has actually had something of a resurgence in recent years. As recently as May 15, 2018, the song was absent from Gabriel’s Spotify Top 5. At that time, Gabriel’s 2010 cover of Bowie’s “Heroes” was his second-most streamed song.
“Swingin Party” by The Replacements
The Replacements don’t get the same volume of listeners as Bowie or Gabriel do, but they didn’t lack for hits on modern rock and college radio stations. Their one big pop and mainstream rock crossover hit, “I’ll Be You,” is currently ninth on their Spotify rankings. While it’s surprising “I’ll Be You” doesn’t rank higher, “I Will Dare,” “Alex Chilton,” and “Can’t Hardly Wait”—all of which received substantial radio airplay—seem like reasonable candidates to hold down the top spot.
Instead, it’s “Swingin Party,” a non-single track from the 1985 album Tim, that holds that honor. The Replacements’ song about how “liquid courage” helped them to deal with stage fright has been streamed more than 34 million times on Spotify, but it is not the most popular version of the tune on the platform. Lorde’s cover of the song has more than 47 million streams, and it has likely helped the original version grow in popularity. On January 27, 2014, ”Swingin Party” ranked as The Replacements’ ninth-most popular track on Spotify. This is the last date The Replacement’s Spotify rankings were captured on the web archive site Wayback Machine prior to Lorde’s Japanese release of Pure Heroine—the version of the album that contains her cover of “Swingin Party.” By September 5, 2015, the song had cracked The Replacements’ Top 5.
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Photo by Karl Walter/Getty Images for Coachella
