Kelly Clarkson is the latest member of Spotify ‘s Billions Club. “Since U Been Gone,” a single from her 2004 album Breakaway , has become her first release to reach one billion streams on the digital streaming platform.

Earlier this year, Rolling Stone named “Since U Been Gone” the 31st greatest song of the 21st century , describing the record as “a song that quickly became both an enormous hit and (perhaps because of the sound it was aping) a universal critics’ darling. From the very first line, Clarkson makes the song her own; she later recounted having to argue with her collaborators about her desire to jump an octave for the chorus. But even if the song represented, for Clarkson, a fraught experience with A-list songwriters, it remains a masterful slice of early-aughts indie-

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