A billion is a number that feels too great to even fathom — but then again, so is the pop juggernaut that is "Call Me Maybe." Carly Rae Jepsen's 2011 hit — one of Exclaim!'s 50 best Canadian songs of the 2010s — has now surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.
Jepsen joins the ranks of the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," next-gen pop phenoms Tate McRae and Olivia Rodrigo, Queen and more as she's welcomed to Spotify's Billions Club.
"Call Me Maybe" is placed on the streamer's playlist of billionaires right ahead of a Justin Bieber hit (and also, importantly, very near "Africa" by TOTO), since the Biebs's love for the tune — which he famously described as "possibly the catchiest song I've ever heard lol" — helped propel it and Jepsen into the stratosphere. Remember when he and Selena Gomez got all their famous friends together to make that low-budget lip-sync video to it? It truly was a different era.
In September 2021, the Mission, BC-born singer-songwriter reflected on the song's 10-year anniversary. Jepsen called it "a lightning bolt to my little life," and gave a charming anecdote about the first time she experienced people talking about her music publicly when she was still working as a waitress. She co-wrote "Call Me Maybe" with longtime collaborator Tavish Crowe and Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench, who also produced the now-certified Diamond track.
There's something almost unbearably pure about "Call Me Maybe," even all these years later when it has been overplayed in every single life scenario you can imagine. (Side note: I recently heard it in a gum commercial, so those recession rumours must be true.) It's an unadulterated burst of bubblegum with Annie Lennox "Walking on Broken Glass"-style strings that is unnervingly irresistible. And that's to say nothing of the satisfyingly poetic simplicity of "Before you came into my life / I missed you so bad"! But, most importantly, it paved the way for Jepsen and her folk tunes to turn a corner and become the pop star she was born to be.
Jepsen joins the ranks of the Goo Goo Dolls' "Iris," next-gen pop phenoms Tate McRae and Olivia Rodrigo, Queen and more as she's welcomed to Spotify's Billions Club.
"Call Me Maybe" is placed on the streamer's playlist of billionaires right ahead of a Justin Bieber hit (and also, importantly, very near "Africa" by TOTO), since the Biebs's love for the tune — which he famously described as "possibly the catchiest song I've ever heard lol" — helped propel it and Jepsen into the stratosphere. Remember when he and Selena Gomez got all their famous friends together to make that low-budget lip-sync video to it? It truly was a different era.
In September 2021, the Mission, BC-born singer-songwriter reflected on the song's 10-year anniversary. Jepsen called it "a lightning bolt to my little life," and gave a charming anecdote about the first time she experienced people talking about her music publicly when she was still working as a waitress. She co-wrote "Call Me Maybe" with longtime collaborator Tavish Crowe and Josh Ramsay of Marianas Trench, who also produced the now-certified Diamond track.
There's something almost unbearably pure about "Call Me Maybe," even all these years later when it has been overplayed in every single life scenario you can imagine. (Side note: I recently heard it in a gum commercial, so those recession rumours must be true.) It's an unadulterated burst of bubblegum with Annie Lennox "Walking on Broken Glass"-style strings that is unnervingly irresistible. And that's to say nothing of the satisfyingly poetic simplicity of "Before you came into my life / I missed you so bad"! But, most importantly, it paved the way for Jepsen and her folk tunes to turn a corner and become the pop star she was born to be.