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Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ Surpasses 1 Billion Spotify Streams

This article is more than 2 years old.

On Guns N’ Roses’ chart-topping power ballad “Sweet Child O’ Mine,” frontman Axl Rose asks repeatedly and frantically, “Where do we go now?” Today (Aug. 9), the answer is: past the 1-billion-streams mark on Spotify.

“Sweet Child O’ Mine” eclipses 1 billion Spotify streams more than 34 years after its release. The song appeared on Guns N’ Roses’ debut album, Appetite for Destruction, which came out on July 21, 1987. The album barely dented the nether regions of the Billboard 200 upon release, but it gradually gained momentum over the next year and reached No. 1 on the albums chart on Aug. 5, 1988, its first of several summits.

Appetite for Destruction has since sold over 18 million copies in the United States, making it the best-selling debut album of all time and one of the defining records of the ‘80s hard rock zeitgeist.

One month after Appetite reached No. 1, “Sweet Child O’ Mine” followed suit, topping the Billboard Hot 100 on Sept. 9, 1988. The song’s iconic lead guitar riff, which has inspired countless bedroom shredders over the years, came from a warmup exercise that guitarist Slash would routinely play. His bandmates latched onto the melody and began fleshing out parts underneath it, while Rose quickly wrote lyrics as a tribute to his then-girlfriend Erin Everly, to whom he was married from 1990 to 1991.

The “Sweet Child O’ Mine” music video also became the first ‘80s video to surpass 1 billion YouTube views in October 2019. The plaintive, black-and-white performance clip, which features all of the band members’ girlfriends at the time, became a huge hit on MTV and helped rocket the song up the charts.

Guns N’ Roses have maintained a formidable streaming presence in recent years, with several of their other hits (“Welcome to the Jungle,” “Paradise City,” “November Rain”) earning hundreds of millions of Spotify streams. This is due in part to their massively successful reunion tour, which commenced in 2016 and reunited Rose, Slash and bassist Duff McKagan onstage for the first time since 1993. The trek, dubbed the Not in This Lifetime… Tour, earned more than $580 million, making it the third-highest-grossing concert tour of all time, behind tours by Ed Sheeran and U2.  

Fans can still see Guns N’ Roses perform “Sweet Child O’ Mine” today on the current leg of their 2020 tour, which was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. On Friday, the band released a new song titled “Absurd,” the first track to feature Rose, Slash and McKagan since their 1994 rendition of the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”

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