Least streamed songs on their pre-2010 albums :

Back In Black 18m
Highway To Hell 10m
High Voltage 6m
Dirty Deeds 4m
Let There Be Rock 4m
Black Ice 4m
The Razors Edge 4m
Powerage 3m
Stiff Upper Lip 3m
Ballbreaker 2m
For Those About To Rock 2m
Fly On The Wall 1m
Blow Up Your Video 1m
Flick Of The Switch 1m

Zeppelin for comparison :

II 22m
IV 16m
I 14m
Houses Of The Holy 11m
III 7m
Physical Graffiti 6m
In Through The Out Door 4m
Presence 3m

It's true that AC/DC have a lot more forgotten/overlooked tracks than Led Zeppelin.

In all fairness they've had a much longer recording career. AC/DC released about 175 regular songs, Led Zeppelin about 75.
It's like comparing Guns n Roses to Aerosmith. It's easy to discover all of GnRs catalog, Aerosmith not so easy.
With just 3 studio albums Nirvana is another example. Lots of fans would hear all their tracks repeatedly. And listen to Nirvana randomly on Spotify, after an hour or two you're deep into their catalog.

I know Led Zep have 8 studio albums and are somewhere in between, but you get my point.

The exception might be Metallica. Long career, high play counts all over!

Now that I've listed the bottom tracks compared to jan 2019, let's look at their top 30 tracks on Spotify as of 7/2/2023 (and jan19):

1 (1) Back in Black – 1212,6M (343,0)
2 (2) Highway to Hell – 1174,0M (329,2)
3 (3) Thunderstruck – 1126,8M (327,5)
4 (4) You Shook Me All Night Long – 828,1M (231,2)
5 (5) T.N.T. – 547,9M (158,2)
6 (6) Hells Bells – 316,4M (92,0)
7 (7) Shoot To Thrill – 310,7M (90.4)
8 (8) Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap – 291,2M (83,3)
9 (9) It’s a Long Way to the Top – 204,3M (58,3)
10 (10) Rock n Roll Train – 161,5M (41,2)
11 (11) For Those About to Rock – 112,9M (33,7)
12 (13) Whole Lotta Rosie – 105,9M (30,3)
13 (16) Moneytalks – 88,3M (24,0)
14 (14) Let There Be Rock – 83,1M (25,5)
15 (15) If You Want Blood – 78,1M (24.6)
16 (12) Rock or Bust – 74,9M (32,5)
17 (-) Shot in the Dark – 73,6M (new)
18 (22) Who Made Who – 70,1M (17,6)
19 (19) R’n’R Ain’t Noise Pollution – 66,6M (18,5)
20 (21) Touch Too Much – 62,5M (17,9)
21 (17) War Machine – 57,7M (19,8)
22 (22) Stiff Upper Lip – 57,3M (16,5)
23 (34) Are You Ready – 57,2M (10,8)
24 (26) Girls Got Rhythm – 55,1M (15,1)
25 (18) Have a Drink on Me – 53,8M (19,4)
26 (25) Hard as a Rock – 53,2M (15,2)
27 (24) High Voltage – 52,3M (15,9)
28 (20) Hell Ain’t a Bad Place to Be – 49,5M (18,3)
29 (44) Jailbreak – 43,2M (8,2)
30 (32) Fire Your Guns – 39,8M (11,3)

The top 11 remain the same. Rock or Bust (released in 2014) dropped #12-16 and Shot in the Dark (released in 2020) enters at #17.

Most tracks more than tripled since jan19. RnR Train and Who Made Who almost quadrupled. Are You Ready and Jailbreak did fivefold!!

Have a Drink on Me (#18-25) and Hell Ain't a Bad Place to Be (#20-28) didn't do so well. I don't know about HADOM, other than it was removed from "This is AC/DC" at some point. It actually did well until oct2020, neck to neck with RnR Ain't Noise Pollution, but then suddenly it stalled.
HAABPTB was always a popular live track and there haven't been any new live releases since 2012. So while the studio version actually quadrupled since jan19, the total live versions only doubled. As of now 52.4% of it's total plays are from live recordings, back in jan 2019 that number was a massive 69.7%!!!

We learned that bottom Bon tracks are far stronger than bottom Brian tracks. Here it's the other way around. 5 of the top 7 are Brian tracks, and 18 of the top 30 (If we exclude new track Shot in the Dark, next in line is Big Gun (39.7M) - also Brian).
Part of that is because of the landmark Back in Black of course, but also because the Brian catalog is much larger (about 125 songs compared to around 50), so some tracks are bound to be overlooked/forgotten. Also, most people consider the Bon era more consistent.

The Beatles have released more songs than AC/DC :

Abbey Road 27m
Revolver 15m
Rubber Soul 14m
Magical Mystery Tour 14m
Let It Be 14m
Sgt Peppers 14m
The Beatles 11m
Please Please Me 9m
Help 9m
A Hard Day's Night 6m
With The Beatles 6m
Beatles For Sale 6m

Plus all of the "orphan" stuff (Hey Jude...etc).

Some of Metallica's albums are quite recent so it's difficult to compare, Load/Reload are around 6m I think, St Anger more like 5m, which isn't that much for a 2003 album...

Obviously, the Beatles rule just about any stat you can think of 😉

The Rolling Stones have an insanely long recording career. Almost 30 studio albums. If you listen to the "This is the Rolling Stones" spotify playlist of 50 songs (3½ hours) you have barely heard all their hits, let alone deep cuts. Compare that to smaller catalogs by GnR or Nirvana and it's no wonder that the Stones have a lot more small/forgotten tracks.

I think you're focusing too much on playlists, Metallica or Zeppelin fans are mostly into albums, not playlists. Metallica for example :

Master Of Puppets 32m
Ride The Lightning 27m
And Justice For All 26m
Metallica 24m
Kill Em All 15m
Load 6m
Reload 5m
St Anger 5m

These numbers simply represent the popularity of these albums, the Rolling Stones have a lot of forgotten tracks because they have a lot of forgotten albums... Aerosmith is a perfect example, they have more Spotify followers than Zeppelin but check this out :

Toys In The Attic 2.1m
Aerosmith 1.7m
Get A Grip 1.7m
Rocks 1.2m
Pump 1.2m
Nine Lives 1m
Get Your Wings 0.9m
Honkin On Bobo 0.8m
Just Push Play 0.8m
Permanent Vacation 0.7m
Draw The Line 0.4m
Night In The Ruts 0.2m
Done With Mirrors 0.2m
Rock In A Hard Place 0.2m

People just don't care about their albums, that's all.

I think a lot of listeners use Spotify more like the radio. They add some favorites. Some songs, some artists. And then Spotify's algorithm plays similar stuff. And this is likely to be popular songs. This way popular songs get even more popular, forgotten ones stay, well forgotten.
My point is that artists with a large catalog are more likely to have forgotten songs than artists with a smaller catalog.
I'm an album guy. I still have all my vinyls, but I rarely stream an album from start to finish online. When I do, it's usually when I check out a new album release.
I think this is quit normal, because songs on most newer albums have more plays at the beginning of the tracklist and less at the end (singles excepted).
I don't think that pattern is quit as profound on older albums, because users already know which old songs they wanna hear, or Spotify "knows" what songs their users wanna hear.
I realize some still stream DSOTM from start to finish, but all it's songs are in Floyds top 20, and thus are likely to fit Spotify's algorithms as well.
I know I talked about playlists before and algorithms now. But both are likely to draw from popular tracks and not deep cuts. Again if your catalog is the size of Nirvana or GnR there aren't really that many deep cuts to be forgotten.
I mentioned Metallica might an exception, you mentioned Beatles was the obvious exception, but I still believe I have a point.

I'm with Analord on this and always have been. I think it's far more to do with popularity than playlists. The simple fact for me, is that a lot of DCs albums are just not very popular. Same with Queen, even although the film boosted a lot of their underperforming album tracks.

In my opinion the reason those 3 albums by GNR and Nirvana are so well streamed is to do with each bands popularity. Many other acts have 3 album catalogues but do not manage the streams those acts do, so that proves to me that having a small(er) catalogue is not the main reason for excellent streaming figures.

Well, if Queen only had 3 albums they likely wouldn't have had any songs under 100m plays...

And if Nirvana had released 15 albums I'm sure they would have many unpopular songs.

I agree GnR and Nirvana have many streams because they are very popular. Obviously. But so are Queen, AC/DC, Rolling Stones, Aerosmith... All I'm saying is if Nirvana and Guns had released 15 albums, they would likely have many poor performing tracks as well...
"Bleach" is not very good, but Nirvana fans, Nevermind fans don't have many other options do they? So Bleach has strong figures. Whether its due algorithms, playlists or whatever, if Nirvana had a 10-15 album career I bet Bleach had a lot of forgotten tracks...

But your debating in "ifs" and that is pointless. What we do know is, many past acts have had a career of 3 studio albums but not many, if any, have the streams of GNR or Nirvana. If it is so easy to get these kind of streams from 3 albums and playlists, every 3 album act would have them, but they don't, so this has to be about their popularity.

"Well, if Queen only had 3 albums they likely wouldn’t have had any songs under 100m plays…"

What? If Queen broke up after their 3rd album I don't even know if one of their songs would've 100m streams (maybe Killer Queen).

"“Bleach” is not very good"

11th best album from 1989 according to critics, 13th best grunge album ever according to Rolling Stone, and music nerds on RateYourMusic gave it way more ratings than Back In Black (24k vs 17k).

I feel like both of you Martin and Analord are missunderstanding the point of Thomas.

He isn't saying that had Queen only released their first 3 albums, they would be Abbey Roads, obviously not. Not that GnR and Nirvana are weak/average bands.

The point is, had Queen's strength been concentrated in 3 albums, say put 2-3 big hits per album then random deep cuts from them, streams of these deep cuts would be way higher than they are in the current configuration. And the point is, had Nirvana or GnR continued up to now a la Pearl Jam or RHCP, they would still have terrific total streams obviously, but the deepest cuts would be much weaker, because people listening to them (fans mostly) would spread their time over much more songs.

I do not agree that these are "ifs", it's something verified through all artists, and just natural because listening time can't be extended. Just pointing out a random example, and we could pick zillions of them.

Drake's Scorpion has 11 songs with streams between 55m and 125m. It was a massively successful album, and Drake is a huge "album force", but he has a large discography and the album had 25 songs. Harry Styles' last album has all its songs but 1 at 140m or more. Are his deep cuts much more successful? No, it's mostly down to the fact that he only has 3 studio sets, no remixes/side tracks, plus One Direction catalog but it isn't that much of a competition for many listeners.

Even more extreme, Olivia Rodrigo's Sour has only one track below 315m (and that one is closing in 240m). Is it like 5 times more popular than Scorpion? Of course it isn't, it's just that with the same number of fans spending the same amount of time listening to their favorite artist, it concludes on much higher numbers for Sour rather than Scorpion.

By the way, this situation is also visible with big hits but this time it's due to playlists. Big hits of artists who have 2-3 hits only will have relatively higher streams with these than the 2-3 biggest hits from artists with 20+ hits.

The reason is simple, all relevant playlists cap the number of tracks per artists. Say you go listen to 'Rock Classics'. The cap is max 5 songs per artist. AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, the Stones have 5. So have GnR. Songs like Start Me Up or T.N.T. miss out just because of the sheer strength of their remaining hits. In the other side, songs like Don't Stop Believin', House of the Rising Sun, Zombie, Fortunate Son, Smoke On The Water, Hotel California, Wonderwall, Losing My Religion or Creep will be there no matter what. And this is a playlist with a cap at 5, most have either 1, 2 or 3, which make it even more extreme.

I get what Thomas is saying, I just disagree that it is totally to do with playlists, in my opinion it's more to do with popularity. The reason those AC/DCs albums are such poor streamers, is that for the most part they are just not very popular albums and never have been. The public don't really care about stuff like Flick of The Switch, Fly On The Wall, Stiff Upper Lip, Ballbreaker, Powerage, Blow Up Your Video or even For Those About To Rock and never did, they were not particularly popular on release are not now.

I think too much is being made of size of catalogue and not enough about popularity of catalogue. Most acts that exist for decades reach a point where the general popularity of their new releases declines and they become less relevant, only appealing to fans. This happened to the Stones, AC/DC, even Zeppelin, it's clear Presence and In Through The Outdoor are a decline in popularity and success from their first 6 albums. I also think that some acts just have albums people want to listen to, while most don't.