Harry Styles is having himself a year. “As It Was” just got knocked off the No. 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 chart after spending 10 weeks on top, the most of any song this year. Harry’s House is the year’s best-selling vinyl album so far and the first 2022 album to go Platinum. Now, he has another achievement to add to his figurative trophy case: Chart Data reports “As It Was” is now the fastest solo song to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify.
.@Harry_Styles’ "As It Was" becomes the fastest solo song to surpass 1 billion streams in Spotify history.
— chart data (@chartdata) July 27, 2022
“As It Was” was released on April 1, so as of today (July 27), it has been streaming for 118 days. Where does this put “As It Was” in terms of the fastest song overall, solo or otherwise, to cross a billion? It looks like it’s somehow exactly tied for that title. The last reported record-holder was The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s “Stay,” which was released on July 9, 2021 and hit a billion streams on November 4 that year, 118 days later.
This is just Styles’ latest honor, even beyond the aforementioned. Barack Obama dropped his 2022 summer playlist yesterday and among the picks was Styles’ “Music For A Sushi Restaurant.” It was also recently revealed that Texas State University will soon offer a course called “Harry Styles And The Cult Of Celebrity: Identity, The Internet, And European Pop Culture.”