The song I listened to without hearing

If these reflections resonated with you, you are welcome to share it further.

Or, on why some songs outlive us, and others don't

Recently I asked the same question, almost provocatively, to three different AI assistants: if you had to name a single song that combines popularity, success, and longevity, which would it be?

All three converged, without having consulted each other, on the same name: Blinding Lights, by The Weeknd — the most-streamed song in Spotify's history.

I put it on. I listened. It felt familiar — I'd heard it, like everyone else, dozens of times, in the background, in a car, in a shop. But I didn't feel anything in particular. Just recognition, not emotion.

Then I listened again, this time paying attention to the lyrics, not just the beat. And somewhere around the middle, something touched me. Nothing dramatic. Something small, almost hidden beneath all the shine of the revived '80s synths and bass.

What hides beneath the lights that blind

The song has a title that sounds like a party, like neon, like a city night. But underneath it, there's no celebration. There's a cold, empty city, sleepless nights, and an intense longing to get back to one particular person. I started hearing it as someone crossing that night city alone, trying to find the way back to a person he'd drifted away from. The lights that "blind" no longer felt to me like a club's. They felt like a loneliness so bright it's easy to mistake for joy.

I think it was exactly this contrast that touched me on the second listen. A song built, sonically, to be impossible to ignore — a hook made to stay in your head, a beat made for any party — carries, in its lyrics, a very quiet ache. It doesn't show it to you. You have to go looking for it.

Maybe that's why the first listen told me nothing. I had heard the sound. I hadn't heard the song yet.

Why some songs stay, and others disappear

Here, I think, is the real question — not which song is "the best," but why some songs outlive generations, while other hits, just as enormous in their time, fade away completely.

Stream counts measure how many times we pressed play. They don't measure how many times a song went on living inside us after it ended. These are two different things, and the confusion between them accounts, I think, for half the puzzlement around these rankings.

Many songs are extraordinarily well built to catch our attention: a memorable hook, a rhythm recognizable within seconds, a structure that makes us anticipate the next return. Some stay only there. Others, though, hide something beneath that sonic efficiency that can only be discovered much later.

That's exactly what happened to me with Blinding LightsThere's a well-documented phenomenon in psychology — the mere-exposure effect: simply encountering a stimulus repeatedly makes it more familiar, and, under certain conditions, can make us prefer it. But familiarity doesn't guarantee emotion; it can produce mere recognition, which is exactly what I felt on the first listen. In my case, the emotion showed up on a different level: when meaning was added to familiarity.

Maybe real longevity appears exactly when the two meet: when a song knows how to lodge itself quickly in memory, but has enough depth to be heard again, differently, ten or thirty years later.

A question that changes with the criterion

Going back to the question I started with, I noticed that the "correct" answer changes completely depending on what, exactly, you're asking.

If you ask which song has been streamed the most on Spotify, the answer remains Blinding Lights. If we turn to YouTube, another name appears: Despacito, by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee — one of the biggest streaming phenomena in the platform's history, the song that also broke the language barrier, winning several Latin Grammy Awards. If you ask which single has sold the most physical copies in history, the answer is different, and much older: White Christmas, by Bing Crosby, from 1942 — a record Guinness has kept for over eight decades. If we look at the historical BMI charts of American radio and TV airplay, another name comes up, almost unknown to young people today: You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’', by the Righteous Brothers.

And if you ask music critics, not algorithms, the list changes again: Respect, by Aretha Franklin. Like a Rolling Stone, by Bob Dylan. Bohemian Rhapsody, by Queen. Imagine, by John Lennon. Billie Jean, by Michael Jackson. I Will Always Love You, in Whitney Houston's version. None of them tops any current streaming chart. All of them top, instead, a much harder list to measure — the one made up of songs people still consider, years or decades later, important.

I don't think any of these answers is wrong. I just think "the best song of all time" isn't a single question. It's several different questions, wearing the same words.

I return, at the end, to that first listen to Blinding Lights — the one where I felt nothing. I don't think the song told me anything different the second time. I think I, finally, listened to it differently.

Maybe a song stays exactly when the two things meet: when it still has something to say, and we, at a certain moment in our lives, arrive ready to hear it.

Maybe we don't miss the '50s