Rema’s “Calm Down” continues to make music history, with its latest achievement being the most-streamed Afrobeats song in the US.
According to the music monitoring platform Chart Data on X, it has become “the first Afrobeats song in history to earn over one billion on-demand streams in the US.”
Last year, Chart Data already recognized the track as the “most successful African song of all time.”
Billboard magazine analysts attribute its success to its “melancholy slow jam with a subtle hypnotic draw,” noting it is the kind of song that “gets stuck deep in the back of a listener’s mind, prompting them to return again and again.”
Released in February 2022 as a single from Rema’s debut album “Rave and Roses,” the song gained further popularity when Rema partnered with US singer Selena Gomez for a remix a few months later. This remix reached the billion-plays mark on Spotify.
“Calm Down” became the first African song to spend a year on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number three, making it the highest-charting song by an Afrobeats musician as the lead artist.
The remix, with nearly 894 million views on YouTube, is currently the most-watched music video by a Nigerian artist.
This success has catapulted Rema into the ranks of prominent Nigerian Afrobeats artists like Burna Boy, Wizkid, and Davido.
Rema, whose real name is Divine Ikubor, describes his unique style of Afrobeats as “Afrorave.”