Anne-Marie's new one is very clever because it's called Birthday and if you consider that Spotify has 271m active users, that means 742,000 users will today be celebrating their birthday and will each surely play the song twice, because people do strange things on their birthdays. And then of course tomorrow a whole new set of users will celebrate a birthday.
With this in mind Anne-Marie is on course for 10.4m streams by the end of the week and nearly half a billion streams within a year — and that's just on Spotify. (This number would be higher were it not for the strange situation of October 17 being the day nobody on the planet has a birthday — a phenomenon the world's top scientists and statisticians have described as "a rum old state of affairs". That said, the shortfall is slightly offset by people like The Queen having two birthdays.)
Other artists have released birthday-related songs in the past but Anne-Marie is one of the first streaming-native acts to do it so effectively 1 and with any luck Anne-Marie will reap huge rewards for this brave and innovative artistic endeavour.
Stormzy's Birthday Girl, for instance, halved its potential audience↩