Russ has a pair of Platinum certifications for his hit singles “What They Want” and “Losing Control,” as well as a Gold certification for his debut album, There’s Really a Wolf, but none of those accomplishments are nearly as impressive as the Secaucus, New Jersey-born rapper, singer, producer and engineer’s all-time play count on Spotify.
According to data made available to the public, Russ’ current play count, which includes material from six albums and 62 loose singles, currently stands at 1,165,587,748.
That’s right, Russ’ music has been streamed 1.1 BILLION times on the world’s most popular streaming service. This total does not include his play counts on Apple Music, TIDAL, or any of the other locations where his songs are currently available for free or paid-for consumption.
In an email to DJBooth, Russ thanked his fans for their support and he shared his optimism for the future. “I wrote, produced, mixed, mastered, and engineered one billion streams on Spotify. A trillion is possible,” he wrote.
While Spotify doesn’t have an official list of every artist on its service with more than one billion total plays, we do know that Ed Sheeran, Drake, The Chainsmokers, Major Lazer and Justin Bieber all have at least one song that has been streamed more than one billion times globally. Russ is still a long way away from adding his name to that short list of artists—”What They Want” is Russ’ most-streamed single at 174 million plays—but his aggregate total is nonetheless incredibly impressive.