Guns N’ Roses’ ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ Has Hit One Billion Spotify Streams

Less than two years after becoming the first '80s video to hit one billion views on YouTube, Guns N' Roses' iconic "Sweet Child O' Mine" has now reached one billion streams on Spotify.

So… where does it go now? The 1987 track now joins Spotify's Billions Club, along with other rock anthems such as Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," Linkin Park's "In the End," Journey's "Don't Stop Believin','" Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and more.

GN'R released Appetite for Destruction in July of 1987, but it wasn't until "Sweet Child O' Mine" was released as a single about a year later that the album received the attention it deserved. Today, it still remains the best-selling debut album of all time.

The song came to fruition when frontman Axl Rose heard Slash messing around with a little circus-like riff on his Gibson Les Paul. The singer then penned the lyrics about his then-girlfriend and later wife, Erin Everly, but Slash has repeated over and over throughout the years that he wasn't a big fan of the song.

"The actual riff itself I love, but the song itself," he later told the WEBN radio station. "You know, Guns N' Roses was always a real hardcore, sort of, AC/DC kind of hard rock band with a lot of attitude. If we did any kind of ballads, it was bluesy. This was an uptempo ballad."

"But at the same time, it's a great song — I'm not knocking it, he continued. "But at the same time, it just did not fit in with the rest of our, sort of, schtick. And, of course, it would be the biggest hit we ever had."

This new feat now further proves Slash's point. It's the first of their song catalog to rack up that amount of Spotify streams, as well as views on YouTube, which was later followed by "November Rain" — the first '90s video to reach the same benchmark.