Kate Bush ‘Blown Away’ By ‘Running Up That Hill’ Hitting 1 Billion Spotify Streams
Written by djfrosty on June 22, 2023
Stranger Things have happened. But not many. Kate Bush celebrated hitting a major Spotify milestone on Wednesday (June 21) when her signature song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal With God),” hit one billion streams on the service.
“A billion streams!,” the singer wrote on her official site beneath an abstract NASA image from above of a series of streams feeding into a river. “I have an image of a river that suddenly floods and becomes many, many tributaries — a billion streams — on their way to the sea,” she added.
“Each one of these streams is one of you… Thank you! Thank you so much for sending this song on such an impossibly astonishing journey. I’m blow away,” Bush told her fans. The song was originally released in 1985 as the first single from Bush’s landmark fifth studio album, Hounds of Love, running up to No. 3 on the U.K. singles chart and No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100.
But when the song was used as a pivotal dramatic device in the fourth season of the hit monster-chasing Netflix drama Stranger Things, “Running” became a cultural sensation, hitting No. 1 in the U.K. and Australia and on the Billboard Global 200 chart for the first time. And now, with the Spotify billion mark, the track became the first solo recording by a female artist from the 1980s to pass one billion streams on the platform.
Bush is one of just a few artists from that era to hit join Spotify’s “Billions” club, with other members including Tears For Fears (“Everybody Wants to Rule The World”), Toto (“Africa”), A-ha (“Take on Me”) and The Police (“Every Breath You Take”).
Listen to “Running Up That Hill” below.