Spotify has been predicting the success of its most popular song for months
Ed Sheeran's "Thinking Out Loud" ballad is no longer the most streamed song on Spotify.
That honor now belongs to "Lean On" by Major Lazar and DJ Snake, the electronic dance anthem that's managed to rack up a staggering 526 million plays around the world on Spotify since its release 8 months ago, reports Billboard.
What's interesting about the success of "Lean On" is that it never topped Billboard's Hot 100 chart (it peaked at the fourth spot in the U.S. and second in the U.K.) but Spotify saw it starting to gain momentum early in the summer.
"Lean On" reached its highest point on the Billboard chart on August 29, but by then it was already Spotify's top song of the summer globally.
"Our listeners have a keen ear for what's hot and emerging," Spotify's music trends expert Shanon Cook said in early September. "It's exciting that tracks like Major Lazer's 'Lean On', which we predicted would be a strong contender for song of the summer earlier this season, ended up being the summer soundtrack for many music lovers."
Doug Ford, who directs music programming at Spotify, told Tech Insider in September that Spotify is already way ahead of traditional radio in terms of predicting the next hit. "We can see trajectories of songs performing really well in Spotify before they're performing well on terrestrial radio," he said.
Spotify has been investing more in surfacing new music people are listening to, like "Lean On," with algorithmically-powered playlists like "Fresh Finds." For the future of Spotify, "I'm envisioning it like we own a big, large network," Ford told us.