"Zombie" by The Cranberries has been streamed more than one billion times on Spotify, joining a club of less than 500 songs that have reached the milestone on the streaming platform.

"Zombie" by The Cranberries has been streamed on Spotify 1,005,422,684 times at the time of publication on Friday, October 6.

“We’re thrilled to hear that “Zombie” has just exceeded a billion streams on @spotify,” the Cranberries said on social media on October 3.

“Dolores would be over the moon! Thanks to all our fans for your incredible support.”

The Spotify milestone for "Zombie" comes more than three years after the video for the song hit one billion views on YouTube, becoming the first Irish song to do so.

"We are so delighted with the news that Zombie has reached 1 Billion views on YouTube! ? We are sure Dolores has a big, proud smile on her face too. Thank you so much to all our fans around the world for supporting us over so many years." ❤️
- Fergal Lawler #ZombieToABillion pic.twitter.com/KXTRuo1s6I

— The Cranberries (@The_Cranberries) April 18, 2020

The Cranberries isn't the first Irish band to join Spotify's so-called Billions Club. The Script's 2012 hit song "Hall of Fame," featuring will.i.am, has surpassed 1.2 billion streams, while Snow Patrol's "Chasing Cars," released in 2006, has been streamed on Spotify more than 1.1 billion times. 

One Direction, the former boyband that famously featured Mullingar native Niall Horan, also has several songs in Spotify's Billions Club.

"Galway Girl," Ed Sheeran's reimagining of the classic Irish tune, joins them with more than 1.2 billion streams as well.

Despite the undoubtedly huge number of streams, "Zombie" has a way to go until it catches up with the current most-streamed song on Spotify, "Blinding Lights" by The Weeknd, which has more than 3.8 billion streams.

Recently, "Zombie" by The Cranberries has been emerging as a new, unofficial anthem for Irish sporting events, evidenced most notably when thousands of Irish fans belted it out after Ireland's Rugby World Cup victory over South Africa.

Despite being sung at Munster Rugby matches, in a nod to the Cranberries' native Co Limerick, the singing of it at the Rugby World Cup match prompted considerable debate.

Zombie des Cranberries chanté par tout un stade ?#RWC2023 pic.twitter.com/mrHG635Bqy

— Rugby World Cup FR ?? (@RugbyWorldCupFR) September 24, 2023

"Zombie," which was released in 1994 as part of the band's "No Need to Argue" album, centers around the Warrington Bombings, which saw the Provisional IRA murder two young boys in England. 

“We were on a tour bus and I was near the location where it happened, so it really struck me hard – I was quite young, but I remember being devastated about the innocent children being pulled into that kind of thing," Cranberries frontwoman Dolores O'Riordan, who sadly passed in January 2018, recounted to Songwriting in 2017.

"So I suppose that’s why I was saying, ‘It’s not me’ – that even though I’m Irish it wasn’t me, I didn’t do it. Because being Irish, it was quite hard, especially in the UK when there was so much tension.

"It’s so different now. If you told a teenager now what it was like back then they wouldn’t believe you, but it wasn’t such a long time ago."

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