The Most Streamed Songs on Spotify in a 1 Year Period This Decade So Far

Spotify’s charts enjoy a wide following in large part due to their transparency around streaming figures. As a result, we often read about the most streamed songs of all time on Spotify. Due to the nature of streams, however, the cumulative rankings skew in favor of old hits.

As time goes on, this skew toward old songs is further amplified as streams accumulate indefinitely; it gets harder and harder to assess the size of new songs looking at the total stream counts alone. A multi-week #1 song released in 2024 has had far less time to accumulate streams than a song released in 2020, and can rank lower on cumulative lists than much smaller hits.

While Spotify’s audience growth somewhat offsets this effect, giving newer songs a larger audience to gain streams more quickly and catch up, it remains a significant factor, and will continue to become more so as time goes on.

Measuring the impact of new songs

One way to get around the issue of indefinite accumulation is to look at the most streamed songs within their first year or two of release, or to measure how fast a song takes to cross milestones such as 1 billion streams. However, this can be misleading, as some songs take a while to gain traction and peak later in their lifespan.

In this article, we instead look at the most streamed songs in their strongest one year (52 week) period. This allows us to capture songs that may have had a slow start but eventually became hits, as well as songs that were instant successes.

While Spotify’s growth allows songs released more recently to have a larger audience and therefore gain streams more quickly, this metric remains useful to assess the most impactful hit songs with strong peaks this decade on Spotify as a platform.

Methodology

We measure the most streamed songs on Spotify in any one year period so far this decade, from 2020 to 2025. The goal is to capture hits that notably dominated even if streams were split via remixes.

The following rules apply:

• Streaming data is taken from Spotify’s weekly Global 200 chart. Data is counted from Friday, January 3, 2020 (the first full week of the 2020s decade) to the week ending September 25, 2025. Songs released before 2020 are included if they charted during this period.
• Streaming counts are chart-eligible streams as reported by the weekly chart, not counter streams. They are therefore lower than the total streams reported by Spotify.
• The period measured is the strongest 52-week period of streams for a given song — a rolling window that captures its best year performance, not a calendar year or the year since release.
• Alternative versions such as remixes that chart in a given week are combined into the main version, provided the merging is valid for chart eligibility as per official chart rules. The main version’s chart streams are noted additionally.
• Songs that have charted for less than a year are included, but their figures are marked as ongoing and include a full-year projection based on their current trajectory.

Results

Below are the top 30 songs ranked in ascending order.

The year shown for each song is based on its best 52-week period: specifically, the year containing the week of highest weekly streams within that period. It is not necessarily the song’s release year.

Year distribution

2024 hits notably dominate the list and even occupy the entire top 3, with four of the top 5.

Although the most significant cause of this is likely due to Spotify’s continued audience growth over the decade, many had outsized performances as well: 2025 is looking less likely to produce as many entries despite additional growth.

Songs whose strongest 52-week period peaks in 2024 comprise 40% of the list (12 of 30 entries), while no other year manages more than half of that.

• 2025: 1 entry
• 2024: 12 entries
• 2023: 6 entries
• 2022: 5 entries
• 2021: 5 entries
• 2020: 1 entry

Runner-up songs

Songs below the top 30 cutoff but above 1.2 billion yearly streams include (non-exhaustive list):

• “End of Beginning” by Djo
• “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido” by KAROL G
• “we can’t be friends (wait for your love)” by Ariana Grande
• “One Of The Girls” by The Weeknd, Jennie & Lily-Rose Depp
• “Levitating” by Dua Lipa

Looking ahead

Although no 2025 hits have produced any entries in the top 30 so far, it is still early. The only song currently assigned a 2025 year on this list is Gracie Abrams’ “That’s So True,” which was released in late 2024.

Alex Warren’s “Ordinary” has so far accumulated 1.056 billion streams in 33 weeks. It is projected to reach 1.5-1.6 billion in a full year; that would place it in the top 15.

Bad Bunny’s “DtMF” has accumulated 1.062 billion streams in 38 weeks. It’s likely to fall short, with under 1.25 billion projected in a full year.

HUNTR/X’s “Golden” has accumulated 642 million streams in 14 weeks. While still too early to project, it’s a strong candidate for a top 30 rank.

sombr’s “back to friends” has accumulated 822 million streams in 27 charting weeks. It was released right at the end of 2024 and only started charting in 2025.

There are still a few months left in the year for new hits to emerge.