10⁹ — The Series
Monographs that start from the numbers and tell stories.
10⁹ — ten to the ninth, a billion — is the name of this series of monographs. Each issue explores the Billion Club from a different angle: a genre, a decade, an artist, a theme. Every volume is a self-contained, complete analysis, with data and stories. Not a blog, not a transcribed podcast — a publication with its own form and its own voice.
The name isn't accidental. 10⁹ is the scientific notation for a billion — precise, universal, recognizable in any language. Said aloud, it also sounds almost like a line of verse: ten to the ninth. There's something musical in that progression.
n°01 — music genres
Boy/girl bands and the Billion Songs
Thirty-two songs. Sixteen bands. Sixty years of pop music. This volume explores the boy bands and girl groups that reached Spotify's Billion Club — the archive of songs with over a billion streams. From The Temptations in 1964 to BTS, from the Spice Girls to Blackpink, all the way to Huntr/x, the virtual band born from a 2024 Netflix animated film. At the very top, One Direction: six billion songs as a group, eleven as solo artists — the outlier case of this volume, and maybe of the whole history of boy bands.
But not only that: an analysis of the "spin-offs" — the billion-stream songs that former members produced as solo artists, often surpassing their original group's numbers — and a look at who's still missing: the great absentees like Little Mix, the most credible candidates to join the club in 2026, and the bands that could surprise us in the coming years.
Because the Billion Club isn't a closed archive. It's a story still being written.
What's next
The project isn't slowing down. It's only just getting started.
Second half of 2026 — 10⁹ n°02
The Billion Songs of the '70s
A wonderful trip into a decade from over fifty years ago. The '70s are a decade full of extraordinary surprises. From classic rock to disco, from folk to R&B, from Fleetwood Mac's California to ABBA's Stockholm. A decade that invented almost everything pop did afterward. I can't wait to tell you about it.
January 7, 2027 — 10⁹ n°03
All the stats, updated through December 31, 2026
Unmissable: the Billion Club's annual report. How many new songs joined the club in 2026? Who crossed a billion for the first time? Which artists consolidated their dominance, and which came out of nowhere? A document that will become the reference point for anyone who wants to understand where global pop music is heading. Don't miss it.
First half of 2027 — 10⁹ n°04
XXXTentacion and his Billion Songs
This is the volume that keeps me up at night — in the best sense. Jahseh Dwayne Ricardo Onfroy, known as XXXTentacion, died at twenty. His personal story was marked by violence, abandonment, run-ins with the law. No family in the traditional sense, no formal musical background, no singing school or academy. And yet he wrote melodies of an almost inexplicable beauty — songs that touched something deep in millions of people worldwide, and that keep growing in streams years after his death.
How is that possible? What happens when the god of music kisses someone the world had already given up on? It's a question the Billion Club raises with unusual force — and one that deserves a full volume to explore with the respect and complexity it demands.