Photo credit: Danilo Lauria / CC from 3.0
Rihanna is the first artist whose ten songs hit 1 billion streams on Spotify despite not releasing an album since 2016.
Rihanna is the first artist whose 10 songs have hit 1 billion streams SpotifyThis makes her the only girl in the world to have reached such a milestone in years without releasing new music. The 35-year-old Grammy winner responded to the news on social media on Friday.
“Bad Gal billi,” she continued Instagram and Twitter, where she referenced her status as the youngest self-made billionaire in the United States. “Without a new album,” added the singer, whose latest album Antiwas released in 2016. “Let me talk my s-” she finished.
In March, Rihanna told Fashion about the pressure she’s felt to release new music ever since Anti“my most brilliant” and “most cohesive album”.
“I put myself under pressure that if it’s not better, it’s not even worth it,” she said. “It is poisonous. That’s not the right way to look at music, because music is an outlet and a space for creation, and you can create anything. It doesn’t even have to be of any magnitude. It just has to be something that feels good. It could just be a song I like; It could literally be that simple.”
“I realized if I keep waiting for this to feel right and perfect and better, it might take forever, and it might never come out, and no, it’s not that,” Rihanna continued. “So I want to play, and by play I mean I have my ideas in my head, but I can’t say them out loud yet.”
“I want it to be like that this year,” she concluded. “It would be ridiculous if it weren’t.”
Her first song in nearly seven years, “Lift Me Up,” was released as a feature on the October 2022 Black Panther: Wakanda Forever soundtrack. The song served as a tribute to the late actor Chadwick Boseman. The release left fans speculating if a new album from the Caribbean singer was in the works.