The Canadian artist reigns supreme (Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images for Live Nation)
The Weeknd has become the first artist to reach 100 million monthly listeners on music platform Spotify.
Making music history on Monday, the Canadian singer-songwriter’s monthly listener count currently registers at 100,450,642 monthly listeners on the website.
This means he’s already picked himself up a cool almost half-million additional listeners in the matter of hours since he reached the milestone.
His current most popular tracks on Spotify include Creepin’, Die For You, Starboy and his mega-hit Blinding Lights.
Music experts had been anticipating the 33-year-old – real name Abel Tesfaye – surpassing 100 million since January, when he broke the all-time record for most monthly listeners among all artists in Spotify history with 94.734 million.
The artist, who is set to appear alongside Lily-Rose Depp later this year in wild HBO drama The Idol, has dropped two singles recently, with Creepin’ with Metro Boomin and 21 Savage and Nothing is Lost (You Give Me Strength) from the soundtrack of Avatar: The Way of Water both releasing in December.
The blockbuster sequel now sits in third place on the list of highest-grossing films of all time, and the artist has not stopped there, having also just released a silky-smooth remix of Die For You with Ariana Grande.
The Weeknd, who is due to begin the second leg of his After Hours Til Dawn stadium tour in Europe and Latin America this summer, recently credited James Cameron’s first Avatar movie with turning his life around.
Calling 2009 ‘probably the darkest time in my life’, he recalled: ‘I was homeless, pretty much. I had dropped out of school. I didn’t know if I was going to succeed as a musician. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to live to see tomorrow.
One of the singer-songwriter’s more recent tracks, penned for Avatar 2, had a particular meaning to the star (Picture: Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic)
‘And I remember I somehow got to see the film in theatres. I don’t know how I got in.’
‘It was such an escape from my real life that the film is tattooed in my brain,’ he revealed to The Hollywood Reporter.
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Two years later, he broke through in the industry with his mixtape House Of Balloons, and has now come full circle with his work on the Avatar sequel, which he said ‘felt like kismet’.
‘The best part about writing the song was getting notes from [writer-director] James [Cameron] and making sure that all the lyrics and the tones fit the theme. I rewrote the song maybe six times to make sure it was perfect.’
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Music analysts had been predicting the milestone since January.
