For Die-Hards Only: Spotify's Billions Club with The Weeknd
BY
Erica Campbell | Dec 20, 2024
Being a true music lover ain’t for the faint of heart. But, as PAPER witnessed earlier this week, the art of musical worship has not completely lost its purity, and hours of idolization — and in this case — streaming, can sometimes pay off.
On Tuesday night in Santa Monica, in a dimly lit airplane hanger turned concert venue, we joined The Weeknd and nearly 2,000 of his top Spotify fans to celebrate the global star surpassing one billion streams on 24 individual tracks (and counting). The free-for-fans event was swarming with food trucks, photo ops, Weeknd-themed cocktails and a stage in the round so that revelers surround him on all sides.
The bare-bones venue, lit with white lights and a circular glowing structure framing the stage from the ceiling like a halo, is a far cry from the massive venues The Weeknd frequents (see: his upcoming one-night-only Rose Bowl Stadium show set for next month). And without all the pomp and circumstance, nary a collab to be seen, just Abel Tesfaye in a puffer vest, hitting every note with a smile across his face — Spotify’s first ever "Billions Club Live" event proved that music lovers, the folks who make this whole industry go round, are eager for and deserve more raw, stripped-back fan-first experiences.
A crowd comprised of ultra-fans, singing every word at the top of their lungs, dancing like everybody’s watching and thrilled to be breathing the same air as their fav just hits different. Those vibes were felt from the stage as well as The Weeknd spoke to fans directly between each hit track. “Everybody knows these songs and everybody’s singing along,” he beamed back at the crowd. “This is what I love about Billions Club.”
It’s a point I’m sure isn’t lost on The Weeknd, whose dark, pulsating synth-pop banger ”Blinding Lights” topped the Billboard Hot 100 and also happens to be his most streamed song to date, with more than four billion listens on Spotify — but it was infamously snubbed at the Grammys despite being lifted from that year’s best-selling album. Watching him play the track live, ears buzzing from the sound of the audience singing over him in the midst of the small crowd that made the song the hit (it's currently the most streamed song on all of Spotify) felt like sonic reparation.
The other benefit of knowing that everyone in the room has an encyclopedic knowledge of your music is that the stage banter comes off as a bit more candid. "It's a little holiday gift for the OG XO fans," Tesfaye said from the stage at the start of the set, later telling us that he had "new shit coming out" before noting that 2025 would bring new music, a new tour and a new movie. He also seemed to be making new plans in real-time, telling the audience: “It’s been a while since I’ve been at a venue like this. Feels like back in the Kiss Land tour or Trilogy tour ... maybe after the stadium tour, we might go back in time and we might do smaller venues.” He even teased a snippet from an unreleased song from his upcoming album, Hurry Up Tomorrow, set for release next month.
Sure, hits like "Save Your Tears," "Can't Feel My Face," "Earned It," and "Saved Your Tears" were made for and will always be at home at larger-than-life stadiums and visually stunning world stages. But more often than not, those songs are heard from laptop speakers, on road-trip playlist and from our headphones on long, escapism walks. So, for those fans using those songs to soundtrack their every day, it's nice to know they occasionally get a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
Photography Courtesy of Spotify
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