What you need to know
Congratulations to Kelly Clarkson!
The pop superstar and talk show host, 43, joined the Spotify Billions Club this week after his hit song ‘Since You Been Gone’ became the first to reach 1 billion streams on the platform.
This pop-rock song was released as the second single from Clarkson’s 2004 album Breakaway, and reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The song has since been certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America for sales of over 1 million copies, but that certification has not been renewed since 2006.
“Since You Been Gone” won the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 2006, and its music video won two MTV Video Music Awards in 2005 for Best Female Video and Best Pop Video.
This hit song was written and produced by Max Martin and Lukasz “Dr. Luke” Gottwald. In a 2023 interview with Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live, Clarkson shared his thoughts on the difficult process of creating the song, after Clive Davis claimed in his 2013 memoir that he hated the song.
“Let me tell you the inside story,” she said at the time. “I was fooled and told, ‘There are producers who want to work with you and we have this song.’ There were dummy lyrics. They didn’t have lyrics. They wanted me to work on it. They asked me to write the song.”
Ms Clarkson explained that she had flown to Sweden to work with Mr Martin and Mr Gottwald, but that they had “not been informed that they would be writing to me and had already done so”.
“I looked like a fool,” she said. “The label told me something completely different. That’s a red flag. Why would you lie to me like that? I don’t like that lie. So I get bad vibes from that song. It’s an interesting fact that people want to ignore.”
However, Clarkson admitted that the song was “perfectly fine to sing.”
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“I’m a very good compartmentalist, so on tour I can put that aside and sing my heart out,” she said. “I’m not going to do that.”
Clarkson may only have one song streamed a billion times on Spotify, but several others aren’t far behind. “Underneath the Tree” has 863 million streams, and “Because of You” and “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)” each have over 800 million streams.
