No Dylan but loads of Coldplay! What the songs with a billion streams on Spotify tell us about music taste today

Spotify’s Billions Club tracks the world’s most popular songs, but dozens of greats are nowhere to be found. From TikTok to TV soundtracks, we explore the forces shaping pop’s new canon

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 frisky 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 raucous 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 and up, until last March it passed a remarkable milestone. Unlike Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Pink Floyd or Prince, Surf Curse can claim membership of Spotify’s Billions Club, the running playlist of every song to have achieved 1bn streams. They are not sure how to feel about that.