Avicii’s ‘Wake Me Up’ Sets Spotify Record

On Thursday, Spotify announced via Twitter that Wake Me Up, the new song from Swedish DJ Avicii, has set a new record for the music-streaming service. The song, which was released as a single last summer, became the first to cross 200 million plays.

That number averages out to 850,000 plays per day, according to MTV.com, or more than 1,500 years worth of listens. So, yes, Wake Me Up is the most popular song right now, and it will be for quite some time.

Time reports that the country/techno song is still going strong with more than 3.8 million plays per week globally. The cities where Wake Me Up is most popular are Stockholm, Oslo, Gothenberg, London, New York, Madrid, Malmö, Barcelona, Copenhagen, and Los Angeles.

Wake Me Up surpassed the previous holder, Imagine Dragons’ Radioactive, which has 182 million plays, according to Spotify’s blog. It also became the fastest song to reach 100 million streams, which it did back in September.

Even a cover of Wake Me Up is doing very well with the Internet. A recent story from The Inquisitr stated that the song was performed by a very popular bagpipe band called The Red Hot Chili Pipers as part of the kickoff for the announcement of BBC’s Radio 1’s Weekend in Glasgow. Their cover has already been seen by more than 1.6 million people on YouTube.

Avicii, whose real name is Tim Bergling, said in a statement released on Spotify’s Twitter account that he is “excited” about being the first artist to reach that milestone.

“I’ve had an amazing year, so a massive thanks to all my fans,” he said.

Wake Me Up began as a collaboration piece between Avicii, Aloe Blacc, and Incubus guitarist Mike Einziger. Avicii and Einziger were working together in Einziger’s studio in Malibu. They had something “melodically,” Avicii told MTV.com, but they didn’t have any words to go along with it. And that’s where Aloe Blacc came into play. His time on the project was very short.

“I was working with Aloe Blacc on another project, and so I called him in and he kind of threw down some lyrics that he had written for something else, and he adapted it to this, and so he was in and out in a couple of hours,” Avicii said.

Wake Me Up was the first single from the Swedish DJ’s first album, True, which released in September. The song became the fastest selling in 2013 with over 267,000 copies sold in one week, according to the UK’s Metro. It beat Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines – the previous holder – by 76,000 copies.