Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life” has been streamed one billion times on Spotify. It becomes the third of the band’s classic hits to achieve this status, following on from “Livin’ On A Prayer” in January 2023 and “You Give Love A Bad Name” in June 2024.
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“It’s My Life” was originally released as the first single from Bon Jovi’s multi-platinum seventh album Crush in June 2000. Written by Jon Bon Jovi, guitarist Richie Sambora and Max Martin, and co-produced by Luke Ebbin, it peaked at No. 1 in nine European territories while charting within the top 10 across several other countries and peaking at number 33 on the US Billboard Hot 100. The song includes The song is notable for Sambora’s use of the talk box, and a line in the second verse “For Tommy and Gina, who never backed down” refers to the same fictional working class couple that Bon Jovi and Sambora first wrote about in 1986’s “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
Back in July 2021, “It’s My Life” reached another significant milestone, when its official video hit a billion views on YouTube – becoming Bon Jovi’s first song to do so. The “It’s My Life” video was directed by Wayne Isham who had previously helmed a number of videos for the band, including “In These Arms,” “Bed Of Roses” and “Someday I’ll Be Saturday Night.”
Reflecting on the success of the song in an interview with Germany’s Deutsche Welle in 2005, Jon Bon Jovi said “When I was writing “It’s My Life,” I thought I was writing very self-indulgently about my own life and where I was in it. I didn’t realize that the phrase ‘It’s my life’ would be taken as being about everyone–by teenagers, by older guys, mechanics, whatever. ‘It’s my life, and I’m taking control.’ Everyone kind of feels that way from time to time.”
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