3 Doors Down’s “Kryptonite” has joined the Spotify Billions Club. The Mississippi rock band’s debut single has now been streamed more than one billion times on the streaming platform, a milestone that has been reached by fewer than 800 songs.
Upon its release in 2000, “Kryptonite” quickly became 3 Doors Down’s breakthrough hit, establishing a foothold at rock radio that eventually extended into pop formats. “Kryptonite” became the highest-charting rock single of 2000, peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song also maintained the year’s longest stint at No. 1 on Mainstream Rock Tracks (nine weeks) and Modern Rock Tracks (11 weeks).
Brad Arnold, 3 Doors Down’s singer and original drummer, wrote “Kryptonite” in high school in Escatawpa, Mississippi, after getting a spark in his creative writing class. “In that creative writing class, you get kind of your wheels turning and you’re learning how to write stories. That’s how I got into writing lyrics, through writing short stories,” Arnold told Songwriting Magazine years later. “After the creative writing class there was a break and then math. I hated math and would just sit there and write every day. I would write lyrics all the time in that class. I barely passed.”
3 Doors Down kept “Kryptonite” as a fixture of the setlist as they honed their craft and built up a following around the South. When the band gave a demo recording of “Kryptonite” to Biloxi-area radio station WCPR-FM (97.9 FM), it became a local sensation. The station’s program director helped them find management, which in turn led to a record deal with Universal.
“Kryptonite” appeared on The Better Life, 3 Doors Down’s 2000 debut album, recorded at the famed Ardent Studios in Memphis and mixed at The Record Plant in Los Angeles. Besides “Kryptonite,” the album spawned two more Hot 100 hits in “Loser” and “Be Like That” and eventually went seven times Platinum.
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