It’s not easy to have a song reach a billion plays on Spotify, but now a new artist has been welcomed into the club of performers who have pulled it off: Today, Harry Styles’ hit single “Watermelon Sugar” has apparently topped a billion plays. As of this post, the Spotify play count for the song is at 999,056,008 on my desktop Spotify app, so either my count isn’t updated or the song will very soon eclipse a billion. Regardless, Styles fans are celebrating the feat, as both “PROUD OF HARRY” and #1BWatermelonSugar were trending topics on Twitter today.
PROUD OF HARRY and #1BWatermelonSugar are trending Worldwide!
— Harry Styles Updates (@Harry_StylesUp) January 14, 2021
Watermelon Sugar has reached 1 Billion streams on Spotify!
Marking Harry’s first song to reach this milestone. A massive congratulations to @Harry_Styles
pic.twitter.com/LgXgMJsNNg
— DawBell (@DawBell) January 14, 2021
I’m so proud of harry!! 1 BILLION views in less than a year. HE DID IT ALL BY HIMSELF. He just keeps achieving new milestones. I’m SO proud of him.
PROUD OF HARRY#1BWatermelonSugar pic.twitter.com/zthukr8Fgf
— Nora (@91HSVOGUE) January 14, 2021
Meanwhile, “Adore You” has surpassed 700 million plays today to become his third most-played song, just after “Sign Of The Times,” which has over 750 million plays.
.@Harry_Styles‘ “Adore You” has now surpassed 700 million streams on Spotify.
— chart data (@chartdata) January 14, 2021
Introducing the song before playing it during his Tiny Desk concert back in March 2020, Styles described how it came to be, saying, “[I wrote ‘Watermelon Sugar’] in 2017, while I was on tour for the first album. I was in Nashville on my day off, and we went into the studio just to kind of play around a little bit. We started some ideas and then I was with the guys that I made the first album with and we had this idea, this chorus melody, it was pretty repetitive […] This song became ‘Watermelon Sugar.’ It’s probably the longest it’s ever taken me to finish a song.”