Blinding Lights first Spotify track to surpass 5 billion streams

Spotify announced on Sunday that The Weeknd's 2019 single "Blinding Lights" has become the first song in the platform's history to surpass five billion streams, a new milestone for the streaming era and a fresh chapter in the track's unprecedented chart run. The streaming service made the announcement on Instagram on Aug. 31, 2025, and The Weeknd, born Abel Tesfaye, reposted the news to his Instagram Story before performing on the current leg of his After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour.

Released in November 2019 as the second single from After Hours, "Blinding Lights" has enjoyed sustained popularity across radio, streaming and sales. Billboard has highlighted several of the song's record-setting achievements: it spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, logged a 57-week run in the Hot 100's top 10 from February 2020 through April 2021 and amassed 86 weeks in the chart's top 40, according to Billboard. The magazine also named the song the top Hot 100 hit in its Greatest of All Time Hot 100 retrospective in 2021 after it surpassed Chubby Checker's 1958 standard-bearer "The Twist."

The streaming milestone follows other industry recognition. Days before Spotify's five billion...