Popularity of David Bowie songs on Spotify Plays per hour

Plays are expressed as a percentage of the maximum hourly plays for the leading song.

After David Bowie died, readers across the Internet commemorated his life with a flurry of essays, tweets and GIFs. They also listened to his music. When an artist as complex as Mr. Bowie dies, what work do we remember him by?

In the past, the answer was hard to quantify. After Queen’s Freddie Mercury or Kurt Cobain of Nirvana died, it was a safe bet that people were listening to classic songs like “Bohemian Rhapsody” or “Smells Like Teen Spirit” on CD or tape cassette. But it was impossible to measure what songs the fans queued up. With today’s streaming audio, that information is centralized. We asked one of the biggest music streaming services in the world, Spotify, to dig it out.

Mr. Bowie’s death was announced early Monday, roughly at 1:30 a.m. Eastern. His plays spiked, most likely from Europe. Most of America didn’t learn the news until after awakening hours later. You can roughly pinpoint when that moment was: 8 a.m.

By that point, the Spotify streams for Mr. Bowie’s songs were over 27 times more popular than usual, leaving a clear delineation of what songs fans remember Mr. Bowie by. No. 1 is “Heroes.” Next was “Let’s Dance,” followed by “Life on Mars?”

The data reveals the unexpected twists of fans’ fond memories. “Heroes,” an introspective rock ballad produced with Brian Eno, was more or less a flop when it came out, falling short of getting on the Billboard charts. “Let’s Dance,” an up-tempo dance tune, was the biggest hit of Mr. Bowie’s career, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 in 1983.