RAIN Notes: September 4, 2025

Billion with a “B”

We learn that the song Blinding Lights, by Canadian singer/songwriter The Weeknd, became the first song in the history of Spotify to play five billion streams. That eye-popping milestone was reached on August 31. The song itself — packaged on The Weeknd’s After Hours album, was released in November, 2019, so it took a little less than six years to accumulate those plays. Unsurprisingly, i was also the first song to surpass four billion plays. Notably, Blinding Lights is also the biggest song in the history of the Billboard Hot 100 chart, replacing previous champ The Twist (hubby hecker).

 

Ongoing Partnership

 

iHeartMedia splashes the continuation of its partnership with the National Football League, announcing the 2025 fall podcast lineup. Anchoring the rundown is a new show: NFL Cover Zero, and one existing podcast joins the network this year — Late-Round Fantasy Football Podcast. This is the fifth season of the NFL Podcast Network, which started in 2021, and which produced all official NFL Media and NFL Films podcasts. Full PR HERE.

 

At the core

The Podcast Landscape, an annual podcast research study produced by Sounds Profitable, has been released and is now publicly live. With a focus on what it calls “core podcast metrics,” it shows that audience expectations have shifted year-over-year, particularly regarding whether podcasting is an audio or video experience.) The audio-only” expectations have shrunk a bit.) But is it about winning and losing, or about serving the listener with choice? Not to mention the “listening-to-video” phenomenon. There’s much more to the output, including multicultural consumption, frequency of listening, audience ethnicities, and much more. The free download is HERE.

 

September 4, 2025

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