Spotify Most-Streamed Artists

This webpage examines the relationships between artists' overall streams, tracks released, and streams of featured tracks.

# Artist Lead Streams Tracks 1b 100m 10m 1m Feat Streams
1 Taylor Swift 118,550,829,855 526 22 262 413 471 1,228,275,733
2 Bad Bunny 102,815,458,575 216 28 176 209 210 11,247,117,098
3 Drake 98,354,564,600 361 20 235 348 351 28,980,319,276
4 The Weeknd 81,466,592,998 268 28 110 200 259 9,712,778,751
5 Ariana Grande 60,966,575,855 317 22 105 190 256 3,777,986,334
6 Ed Sheeran 57,658,242,271 364 14 82 228 322 4,575,402,276
7 Justin Bieber 55,339,104,827 271 15 82 210 242 15,761,343,128
8 Eminem 54,589,868,592 354 12 98 268 318 7,249,533,866
9 Billie Eilish 54,544,434,694 81 17 69 76 77 551,382
10 Kanye West 51,571,754,838 317 12 108 234 287 9,534,476,510
11 Post Malone 48,353,719,423 151 14 74 127 134 5,155,349,768
12 BTS 45,751,069,200 295 6 127 233 295 990,597,479
13 Coldplay 43,913,430,940 338 12 53 211 313 13,820,461
14 Rihanna 43,686,836,868 380 15 57 124 232 12,125,436,146
15 Travis Scott 43,252,013,401 179 5 91 147 171 19,012,515,799
16 Bruno Mars 42,796,939,039 94 16 41 66 84 7,906,473,742
17 J Balvin 41,610,712,826 314 6 80 194 288 11,527,843,949
18 Kendrick Lamar 40,604,963,124 141 11 77 130 138 16,394,586,179
19 Dua Lipa 39,289,808,053 271 12 45 107 222 585,751,688
20 Imagine Dragons 38,404,901,847 262 11 52 151 227 118,395,619
21 Juice WRLD 37,533,411,306 152 8 82 146 149 6,750,972,386
22 David Guetta 36,676,859,538 1,050 4 64 229 607 2,784,026,255
23 Lana Del Rey 35,875,095,158 203 8 79 160 192 3,292,315,748
24 XXXTENTACION 34,499,654,819 159 10 54 123 158 3,838,242,360
25 Lady Gaga 34,424,100,720 382 9 46 145 265 115,968,305

Definitions:

Lead Streams
The total number of streams on Spotify across all songs that the artist is the lead on, this number is used to create the ranking.
1b
The total number of songs by the artist that have been streamed on Spotify at least one billion times.
100m
The total number of songs by the artist that have been streamed on Spotify at least one hundred million times.
10m
The total number of songs by the artist that have been streamed on Spotify at least ten million times.
1m
The total number of songs by the artist that have been streamed on Spotify at least one million times.
Feat Streams
The total number of streams on Spotify across all songs that the artist is featured on.

A closer look at some individual stats:

# Artist Lead Streams Tracks 1b 100m 10m 1m Feat Streams
9 Billie Eilish 54,544,434,694 81 17 69 76 77 551,382
Billie Eilish has the lowest number of tracks released and streams of featured songs, she sits at 9th place.
# Artist Lead Streams Tracks 1b 100m 10m 1m Feat Streams
1 Taylor Swift 118,550,829,855 526 22 262 413 471 1,228,275,733
At number one, Taylor Swift has the highest number of tracks released, after David Guetta who has 1,050 and sits at #22.
# Artist Lead Streams Tracks 1b 100m 10m 1m Feat Streams
3 Drake 98,354,564,600 361 20 235 348 351 28,980,319,276
Drake sits as the third most streamed artist when counting only his Lead Streams.
# Artist Lead Streams Feat Streams All-Credits Streams
1 Drake 98,394,940,990 28,991,052,091 127,385,993,081
Drake becomes the number one most streamed artist when counting his Featured Streams as well.

Impact of the number of tracks released

It makes sense that releasing more music would give an artist a higher stream count by giving listeners more options and chances to find music they enjoy and thus will stream. This seems to be the case with Taylor Swift but high track numbers are not always an indicator of an artist's total streams. Billie Eilish has the lowest number of tracks in the top 25 with 81 tracks, one of two artists in the double digits with the other being Bruno Mars who has 94 tracks and is ranked #16, despite this Billie Eilish is still ranked 9th while David Guetta, the artist with the most streams, is ranked 22nd.

Impact of Featured Songs

Featured songs often skyrocket newer artists to fame but aren't counted in the ranking for Spotify's Most-Streamed Artist so it may surprise some people to see their favs lower on the ranking. An example of the power of feature songs is Drake, who is ranked third on Spotify's overall list but makes his way all the way to first with the inclusion of Featured Streams. Billie Eilish, on the other hand, hardly ever features on other artists' songs, leaving her with the lowest number of Featured Streams by 13,269,075 yet she remains ranked relatively high.

Impact of "Hit Songs"

All of the artists on this page have at least four songs that have hit one billion streams, with the top five having at least 20. This shows that it is more important to have multiple songs do really well than to have hundreds of songs do just okay or to have only one hit song. For the artists on this list, the vast majority of their songs have at least one million streams, showing their overall popularity and that one hit song is not enough to get an artist to the big leagues in terms of streaming numbers.

It is hard to determine what will make an artist blow up and how to leverage those traits but it is clear that the Top Streamed Artists on Spotify have, for the most part, at least 100 tracks released with multiple hit songs achieving high streaming numbers. Featured songs can skew the perception of an artists' fame by boosting the number of times people hear their voice without boosting their individual streaming numbers. Typically, a highly streamed artist has many popular songs that they have accumulated over a long career, not just a few or singles that went viral overnight. Anomalies to these trends do exist with artists releasing hundreds of songs without achieving the highest stream numbers or releasing few songs that almost all do really well in terms of streams.