"Crazy Train" has crossed one billion streams on Spotify, placing Ozzy Osbourne's 1980 solo calling card in the platform's Billions Club.
The Billions Club is a playlist launched in 2020 collecting every track on Spotify to pass the ten-figure mark; artists who make it are sent a commemorative plaque. Just over 1,300 songs have managed it so far, out of the tens of millions on the service.
Metal is thinly represented in that company, which makes the entries that do exist worth noting. "Crazy Train" joins METALLICA's "Nothing Else Matters", "Enter Sandman" and "Master Of Puppets", SLIPKNOT's "Duality", EVANESCENCE's "Bring Me To Life", AEROSMITH's "Dream On", GUNS N' ROSES' "Paradise City", VAN HALEN's "Jump", SURVIVOR's "Eye Of The Tiger" and PAPA ROACH's "Last Resort".
Part of the song's reach is simple ubiquity. That opening riff has been licensed relentlessly — into the films "Megamind" and "Magic Mike", and the television shows "The Osbournes", "The Office" and "The Simpsons" — to the point where plenty of people know the intro without knowing whose record it came from.
The record in question is "Blizzard Of Ozz", Ozzy's debut solo album, cut immediately after he was fired from BLACK SABBATH and built around his short, extraordinary partnership with guitarist Randy Rhoads. The LP was certified quintuple platinum in the United States in February 2019, passing five million certified units more than two decades after it went quadruple platinum in August 1997.
"Blizzard Of Ozz" was reissued in 2011 in a definitive edition that restored and remastered the original recordings from the analog tapes and added previously unreleased bonus material. It appeared on its own and inside a deluxe box set paired with 1981's "Diary Of A Madman", which bundled both albums on CD and vinyl with a 100-page coffee table book, a documentary on DVD and a full-size replica of Ozzy's cross.
Those 2011 reissues also settled a long-running grievance. They reinstated the bass and drum tracks originally played by Bob Daisley and Lee Kerslake, which had been stripped out and re-recorded for a 2002 reissue overseen by Ozzy's wife and manager Sharon amid a royalties dispute. For nearly a decade, the widely available version of "Crazy Train" was not the one that was recorded in 1980.
The version now sitting at a billion plays is the real thing.
Source: blabbermouth.net