In the pre-streaming era, the ultimate sign of success for a musical artist was to chart high on the Billboard charts.
That’s why it was such a coup any time one of our own like a Pantera or Metallica knocked the Mariah Carey’s of the world out of the top spot.
In the era of streaming, physical album sales do still (unfortunately) matter, but as physical media sales just aren’t what they once were, a new “success metric” has emerged in the music industry for judging true superstardom- the elusive ‘Billions Club’.
What’s the ‘Billions Club’? Pretty simple- it’s basically a very hard to crack into tier on Spotify where an artist quite simply (or well, not so simply) surpasses a billion streams of a single song.
Metal has tons of big names who’ve achieved this already, though, right? Surely Megadeth has, right? Nope. Iron Maiden? Nope. Oh, Guns N’ Roses? nah. Well, obviously Metallica has? NOPE. See? Not even the biggest metal band on the planet has hit this mark yet. Although, they are pretty damn close with Enter Sandman currently sitting at a cool 977 million streams on Spotify (at time of writing).
Look, does this metric REALLY matter? Nah, not really. But being the nerds that we are who love random metal-related data and trivia, we did find it fascinating to read through a new study published by Visual Capitalist in which they analyzed every single song on Spotify that has reached the billion stream milestone.
We of course were naturally curious to understand, of the 326 songs in the world that have entered this club, which of them are represented by a hard rock or metal artist.
After having combed through the full list, we present to you the (sadly) very few artists from our corner of the world who have reached a billion streams or more on Spotify so far. While it only makes up 3% of the list, at least we have some representation: