Then again, maybe it’s always been that way and tiktok (like the Steve Lacy situation) just made it more obvious

21 Savage having 65m monthly listeners tells you all you need to know about that metric

The Weeknd has the most listeners cause he works with popular artists in multiple genres.

Same reason Travis jumped so high after the Bad Bunny song and why JID had like 70m listeners after the Imagine Dragons song

Listen to Latin? He got Bad Bunny and a Maluma song
Spanish - Rosalia
Kpop - Jennie
RnB - SZA, Summer
Pop - Ariana
Alt - Lana

Plus he got a song with like every mainstream rapper

wow

He has that many monthly listeners because he’s the biggest hitmaker of this decade with a string of hits since December 2019 + the rest of his catalogue, while also touring the world and promoting his music constantly.

His songs are very big with the average person pretty much everywhere (Starboy, Blinding Lights, Save Your Tears, Die For You, etc), including a very important demographic: straight men which is a massive advantage for him.

Then, there are the collabs I guess…

Over 2 points

Found another old list of Monthly Listeners. From September 2015, when Spotify started showing this feature

1. The Weeknd (23,972,819 monthly listeners)
2. Calvin Harris (19,385,281)
3. Ed Sheeran (19,020,442)
4. Major Lazer (18,644,843)
5. Avicii (17,556,994)
6. Jason Derulo (16,421,327)
7. Maroon 5 (16,133,024)
8. Rihanna (15,832,238)
9. David Guetta (15,767,657)
10. Kygo (15,684,465)
11. Wiz Khalifa (15,599,617)
12. OMI (15,486,162)
13. Flo Rida (15,401,673)
14. Skrillex (14,936,261)
15. Justin Bieber (14,876,316)
16. Diplo (14,539,224)
17. One Direction (14,461,940)
18. Fetty Wap (14,114,919)
19. Drake (13,658,161)
20. Kanye West (13,441,205)

Collabs over everything for that useless metric.

Morgan Wallen has 25M monthly listeners because he sticks to 1 genre. (5th best selling artist of 2023 btw)

21 Savage has 65M monthly listeners because he collabs with many other popular artists.

There's endless examples lmao.

5 EDM artists in the top 10, crazy times

Add to @op

Country music is weak on Spotify and mostly irrelevant outside the USA. Morgan is massive in the US but not in the rest of the world. It’s a global ranking

All of these old lists that I posted from 2015, 2017 and 2019 show exactly the acts that were popular at that time, don’t you agree? Reading them is like a time travel machine. So I really don’t see how monthly listeners don’t mean anything at all. Seems like a very accurate depiction of who’s popular right now on Spotify. Like Beyoncé jumping from ~50M to ~70M in the last 3 weeks because of Texas Hold ‘Em and millions of people that weren’t listening to her now playing the song at least once.

It’s not a perfect metric (people with many features have an advantage) and it’s not definitive, but daily streams are also not entirely accurate representation of artists’ popularity. People that are dropping music constantly will probably have more daily streams than people that don’t, etc

Lmao music is officially "cooked" if one of the biggest pop acts in the world is predicted to sell 165-185k fw

Ariana's biggest first week is 360k, and she only has one other album that's done above 200k first week. Majority of her albums (including her last one) fall within this range.

I still think this is a slightly disappointing number given this is her big comeback and she had tons of physical variants but yeah.

Didn't she sell the same amount with her last album? Doesn't seem like Ariana was ever a big album sales mover, probably more of a singles artist

(just checked and her last album, Positions sold 170k first week)

This is her range , shes not a big first week seller

all that payola and industry politicking to just sell 20k more than Vultures

crazy

The best times tbh

It's cool to see, but I'm pretty sure daily and year-end streams from years back would be more accurate and have less sneaks.

And I wouldn't say people who drop constantly have more daily streams. One Direction is pulling more daily streams than most artists

The brainwashing worked, everyone thinks music is supposed to be free.

its saturday

Kinda wanna look at all the 1m+ first week sellers (there’s 24 in history) and see all the patterns

Should be fun

I feel like pop music relies more on staying power than huge first weeks but there’s a lot of big names releasing soon I’m not sure how that might affect Ariana