Photo Credit: Bonnie Tyler by Katie Scott (Instagram)
Bonnie Tyler’s iconic hit “Total Eclipse of the Heart” reaches over a billion streams, but the artist says it makes next to nothing in revenue.
Turn around, Bright Eyes. Bonnie Tyler’s classic ‘80s hit, “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” has joined Spotify’s coveted Billions Club playlist by surpassing a billion streams on the platform. But even though she sits among the likes of Taylor Swift and The Weeknd on that list, the artist told the BBC she makes “about nothing” in revenue from the iconic song.
The track remains popular 43 years after its release, and Tyler—whose real name is Gaynor Hopkins—says she “never gets tired” of singing it. “Total Eclipse of the Heart” also has the distinction of being Spotify’s most-streamed song by a Welsh artist.
But when asked about how much the singer has made from streams of her hit, Tyler said that the revenue is almost nonexistent. “Oh, it’s nothing; just about nothing,” she said in an interview with BBC News.
However, Spotify told the press that the company “paid out more than $1.4 million in 2025 for streams of Bonnie Tyler’s catalog.” Last year, Spotify said her catalog had generated $1.3 million in payouts to rights holders in 2024 alone; that’s $2.7 million in the past two years.
So who’s getting all that money? Well, the rights to the track have been held by its sole writer and producer, Jim Steinman, who passed away in 2021; the master recording is associated with CBS/Columbia Records. Despite being the singer who recorded the song, Bonnie Tyler does not own the rights to it.
Beyond that, the specifics would have to be revealed in Tyler’s original record deal, or any updates made to its terms. She recorded “Total Eclipse of the Heart” in 1983, but released her first single, “Lost in France,” five years earlier, after signing a recording deal with RCA in 1975.
“The first time I heard it was when Jim Steinman just played it on the piano in New York,” Tyler recalled. “He sang the song all the way through and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this song is amazing. I can’t believe Jim is giving it to me.’”
“When I recorded the song, I thought, ‘No one is going to end up playing this because it’s so long,’” she added. “The original version is eight minutes long.”
But the four-minute version released for radio play hit it big, spending two weeks at #1 in the UK and four weeks in the United States.
“It’s quite an evergreen song—how many times have you heard it popping up in adverts and movies?” Tyler posited. “People just love it.”
With its position cemented as such an iconic song for over four decades, you might think Bonnie Tyler would get a little sick of performing it, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Never, I never get tired of singing it. I love it because everyone can’t wait to sing it,” she said.
Bonnie Tyler actually received two plaques this week: one for over a billion streams of “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and a gold disk for the success of David Guetta’s “Together,” which samples it.
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