“Earned It,” also called “Earned It (Fifty Shades of Grey),” is a song written and sung by the Canadian singer The Weeknd (Abel Tesfaye). It came out as the lead single from the soundtrack to the 2015 film Fifty Shades of Grey, and was later included on his second studio album, Beauty Behind the Madness. Critics liked it, and it sold. It was his first top-five hit on the Billboard Hot 100, peaking at number three. On the same soundtrack, Ellie Goulding’s “Love Me like You Do” also reached number three, so two soundtrack songs sat in the top ten at once.
As a recording, “Earned It” sits in chamber pop and R&B. It is in D minor, slow, about 40 BPM (Largo), in 6/8. The harmony moves between Gm7 and Dm7. The vocal spans two octaves, D3 to D5, over strings pushed forward in the mix. The result feels closer to an erotic thriller than to a hard club track. That sound lines up with what director Sam Taylor-Johnson wanted: a voice that is immediately seductive. Tesfaye called the film and his music a match made in heaven. The album version is a little longer than the single, mostly from a longer intro.
Taylor-Johnson also directed the video, shot at the Palace Theater in Los Angeles and released on Vevo and YouTube. The Weeknd sings on stage while topless women with black tape over their breasts run a BDSM-themed burlesque behind him. Dakota Johnson, the film’s lead, cameos. For people who watch fetish and BDSM media, the clip is multiplex soft-SM branding: tape, burlesque, R&B. It is not a dungeon documentary. It is still one of the widely seen BDSM-coded music videos of the mid-2010s.
Reviews split in the usual way. Mitchell Bozzetto at Renowned for Sound praised the pitch and tone and called it a soothing listen. Tom Breihan at Stereogum heard “soundtracky” strings, said it was not a great Weeknd song, and still called it an interesting career move. Andrew Ryce at Pitchfork liked the vocal and found the song kind of icky. Kitty Empire at The Guardian called it a genre curveball that still sat with the depraved brand he had built on his early mixtapes. Rolling Stone put it at number 39 on its 50 best songs of 2015. The paper treated the Fifty Shades soundtrack as Tesfaye’s way into the pop mainstream: he stepped around S&M, watched the bottom line, and used that liquid falsetto to play an affectionate sugar daddy.
The awards tracked the charts. It was nominated for Best Original Song at the 88th Academy Awards and won Best R&B Performance at the 58th Grammy Awards, with further nominations for Best R&B Song and Best Song Written for Visual Media. On February 16, 2023, the RIAA certified it diamond, more than ten million units in the United States. Besides number three on the Hot 100, it reached number eight on the Canadian Hot 100, the top ten in about ten countries including the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and the top twenty in Australia, Germany, and Ireland.
For BDSM and adult-film readers, “Earned It” is the sound of Fifty Shades at its cultural peak. It does not teach negotiation, and it does not teach safewords. It sells a mood: a slow 6/8, falsetto against strings, and the idea that power, money, and desire can share a beat. It is one place to watch how 2015 pop took on the look of SM without always naming the gear, and how that look got onto the Hot 100.
