BILLIONS CLUB: Rihanna (8/396)

BILLIONS CLUB

Rihanna (8/396)

150/396 = 38%

    Rihanna is back with her eighth Billions Club track, this time it is Stay from Unapologetic.   Stay also features Mikky Ekko- this is his only appearance.  It's only the second song from 2012's Unapologetic to crack the billions club and appears to be the last song from that record that will be making it for some time.  The next highest streamed song on that album is Pour it Up and it barely has 300 million streams.

Published 4/3/23

BILLIONS CLUB

Rihanna (7/389)

135/389 = 34%

   Diamonds is Rihanna's seventh Billions Club track and the sixth she's gotten credit for in the total over-all count.   The major credit in the writing and production of Diamonds is Mikkel Eriksen (of Stargate).  Eriksen is credited with both writing and production alongside others.  Eriksen has six songs in the Billions Club- three by Sam Smith, this Rihanna song and one song each for Julia Michaels and Coldplay.  Is the place to start discussing the impact of Sweden on the Billions Club- when you stop to think that Spotify is, in fact, a Swedish company it starts to make an awful lot of sense.  If anyone in the world understands what it takes to get a song to a Billion streams it would be an established producer in Sweden.  Those guys probably hang out with Daniel Ek, the founder of Spotify.

  Stay should get added next week- it's at 993 million and I think five million plays a week is a pretty solid metric for tracks above 900 million streams. 

From 3/21/23

BILLIONS CLUB

Rihanna (6/376)

88/376 = 23%*

* Rihanna has six songs in the Billions Club but one of them, Love the Way You Lie, has already been counted so the total only moves to 88 instead of 89.

   In addition to Love the Way You Lie, which is listed as an Eminem/Rihanna song but doesn't show up when you search Rihanna's name, Work, which features Drake, does not appear when you punch in Drake's name, so that is another Billions Club track for Drake.  Anyway, you would be hard pressed to find an artist on this list who could give less of a fuck about whether she ever has another hit.  As I write this, she is the #6 artist in the world on Spotify and she's kept her work level at a minimum while maximizing public exposure i.e. song for a Marvel movie, doing the Super Bowl halftime show. 

  It's interesting that she only had one song on the original July 2021 list- Work- the aforementioned Drake featuring track.   She has at least two songs that are poised to join the Billions Club- Stay and Diamonds, both from 2012's Unapologetic LP are right at 980 million streams, so you'd expect them to cross the billion stream mark later this year.  It's interesting that many of her early hits still hover around a half billion streams- do people not groove to Pon de Replay- an early Rihanna bop?    After Stay and Diamonds join the club that will be it for a while.

   Similar to Adele, you'd be hard pressed to be alive in the past twenty years without hearing Rihanna songs, at the very least, dozens of times.  I don't even consider myself a Rihanna fan and I could karaoke five of the six Rihanna Billions Clubs tunes plus maybe another half dozen songs that aren't even close to joining this list.   It's hard to see Rihanna caring enough to ever put up with the bullshit she had would have to go through to make another run at a billion stream track.  People around her might desire it, but if she doesn't care there is no way- it is just too hard of an experience without everyone fully on board to produce the end result.  Like dozens and dozens of rounds of back and forth about different details and creative choices, for years.