Most streamed artists on audio DSPs
Through all platforms, the most streamed artist of all-time is Drake, followed by Taylor Swift, the only two artists so far in 9 digits and with a comfortable lead over anyone else. Two Canadians make the top 3 as the silver medal goes to The Weeknd.
Top Latin act is Bad Bunny, the most listened to group belongs to South Korean heroes BTS, while among legacy artists, leaders are no other than Queen. Full list below.
Most streamed artists on audio DSPs – Results
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Most streamed artists on audio DSPs – How it works
We estimate AOD streams on DSPs for all artists
This ranking reflects the top artists based on estimated career lead streams from all audio on-demand (AOD) Digital Streaming Platforms (DSPs).
AOD DSPs include well known global softwares like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer, or YouTube Music, as well as more local but still very relevant platforms like Anghami, Gaana, Joox, Melon, JioSaavn, Boomplay, etc. Radio-like websites (iHeartRadio, Pandora, etc.) are excluded, same with video platforms.
The large majority of DSPs do not share tracks playcounts, and labels themselves get a clear view of an artist’s streams through all platforms with a delay of several months. That’s why we provide here an estimate for audio streams on all platforms.
How do we do that?
Our scripts consider the market share of Spotify in 100+ countries, the artists’ streams dispatch per market, and the impact of music genres which perform better on some platforms than others.
Thanks to these elements, we can evaluate the exact percentage from their global streams an artist is getting from Spotify only, and then extrapolate known Spotify streams of artists to value total figures.
Numbers include only leading tracks, features are excluded.
Most streamed artists on audio DSPs – Q&A
No. Except for Spotify, DSPs generally don’t share tracks playcounts. Labels themselves don’t get a clear view of an artist’s streams on all platforms before several months.
Our algorithms recoup data (cf. How do we do that? for more details) allowing us to evaluate the exact share of their global streams an artist is getting from Spotify only. With that and as Spotify data is known, we can calculate how many streams an artist has on all audio DSPs. And that’s what we display in this ranking.
When speaking about non-Spotify streams, chances are people from English-speaking countries will instantly think about Apple Music, and how urban artists perform well there.
This is true, but it’s only a very small piece of the overall picture, especially as the US isn’t anymore the overly dominant force it was during the sales era. For example, artists like Drake and Beyonce perform better on US Apple Music than US Spotify, but in Brazil the latter is way bigger, and there Spotify’s market share is massive. Hence, her non-Spotify share is lower than Drake‘s.
That’s why in general Latin music and Brazilian artists are lower in this cross-DSPs ranking, because Spotify dominates there. In the other side, plenty of local Asian platforms are very strong, so local artists appear higher here, just like global stars who perform very well in these places also score a higher Spotify-to-All DSPs extrapolation rate.
CSPC entries. For them, we use the same process, but instead of extrapolating Spotify into all platforms, we also manually retrieve additional platforms (Genie, AWA, Anghami), so the share of strictly factual information is higher, although the difference will be minimal.
While the highest part of the list is comprehensive, as we go down artists may be missing. If you notice an omission, just use our streaming data tool to look for the related artist and if he scored enough streams he will automatically and instantly appear in this top. In fact, we update numbers continuously as you search for them. As soon as new daily data is in for an artist, this will be reflected in the overall ranking.
As the Spotify database is tricky, we can’t guarantee you there won’t be occasional data glitches, even if we developed several controls to grant data consistency. If an issue appears in spite of these controls, we perform manual fixes.
If the issue persists, reach out to us to tell us about it.
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