Spotify’s recently-launched ‘Classics’ initiative has compiled a list of “the 100 greatest R&B songs of the streaming era“. Although be warned, it’s quite a specific definition of that era: songs released since 2015 only.
“Based on criteria such as quality, impact, replay value, influence, and cultural significance, Spotify Classics is 100% qualitative,” promised the company. No data, just the views of its editorial team, in other words.
Top of the list is SZA’s ‘Snooze’ which was released in 2023 and has since been streamed 886.5m times, while also scooping the Grammy award for Best R&B Song earlier this year.
It’s the second ‘Classics’ list, following February’s lineup of 30 hip-hop and R&B albums. The initiative is Spotify’s attempt to remind everyone about its human curators, rather than its collection of recommendation algorithms.
The latest list is also strong evidence for R&B’s streaming clout. The list isn’t ranked by stream-counts, but it does include those figures and if you add them up (YES, we did) the 100 chosen tracks have collectively been streamed 43.2bn times since 2015.
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