It has to be an omnipresent, year-round stinker. So which is it?
In the Guide’s weekly Solved! column, we look into a crucial pop-culture question you’ve been burning to know the answer to – and settle it
First, some housekeeping: the most overplayed song is not simply the one that has been played the most. In terms of Spotify streams, that would make it Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, with 2.8bn listens. On YouTube, it’s Baby Shark Dance with 8.5bn views, because of course it is. Though you may rather pour molten sugar into your ears than subject yourself to these rhythmic filibusters, they are not, by definition, overplayed. Each of those streams was presumably intentional, undertaken by people who wished to endure them. If one of those songs happens to auto-play on your phone, you can turn it off. Or spray-paint it silver and leave it outside for the magpies. It’s completely up to you.
