Most popular artists on Spotify
How do you know which artists are the most popular on Spotify right now? Monthly listeners hardly tell you the truth of it and Spotify’s popularity index isn’t so easy to read although it’s key to understanding one’s success. Let’s shed some light on popularity on Spotify.
Top 250 most popular artists on Spotify
Want to check the detailed streaming numbers for one artist?
Most popular artists – How it works
What does this top mean?
We know that the popularity index is both poorly known and not so user-friendly: it’s a 0-to-100 index rather than raw data. It’s based on ongoing streams relative to remaining artists, with the biggest one being rated 100.
Internally though, this index is key as it’s used as part of algorithms which create and update playlists, bringing a huge value for artists. The higher the popularity index of the artist, the more visible they will get on Spotify. It also reflects the number one artists today, with results from the last weeks, as opposed to cumulative to date streams.
Convinced of its importance for a long time, we developed this page to retrieve the top 50 best performers of the platform, but also how many daily streams they recorded. This last statistic, unique online, adds to the popularity index the concrete meaning it lacks.
In general, an artist will need 10 million daily streams to hit a score of 90, about twice as many streams as the global #1 single usually gets. You have read this correctly. An artist scoring 90 is gaining far more streams than the current #1 smash.
As numbers reflect a scale 100 based on the top performer, the score of an artist can go up or down even when they are consistent by themselves. For example, the madness surrounding Taylor Swift in the second half of 2023 pushed artists amassing 10 million streams per day down to roughly 83.
While the exact formula isn’t shared by Spotify, the scale is exponential, with streams doubling every 5 points. It means that an artist scoring 95 gets about twice as many streams as an artist at 90, itself scoring twice as much as an artist at 85.
This indicator ends up showing how healthy a catalog is, something fundamental to become one of the most popular artists on Spotify.
How do we build this top?
The daily streaming total includes streams on which an artist is featured. The page also displays the 1-week evolution of the index.
We may miss the daily streams total for some entries in this list. No worries, this will last only 24 hours in general. More than 1,500 of the biggest stars are tracked to make sure to not miss artists.
Also, at times daily streams can show a negative total, something happening when one or several songs from an artist are made unavailable by Spotify.
Some history & records
Our own history of rating scores dates back to April 2020. Premium users can see former ratings of artists at this link.
As of November 15, 2023, the leader is no other than Taylor Swift. In fact, she took over the top position on March 19, 2023 and never gave it up. Below are all leaders since April 21, 2020.
2020 Popularity index leaders
Days at #1, start date, artist.
- 2020/04/21 – 14 – Bad Bunny
- 2020/05/04 – 22 – Drake
- 2020/05/26 – 3 – Bad Bunny
- 2020/05/29 – 2 – Drake
- 2020/05/31 – 26 – Bad Bunny
- 2020/06/26 – 18 – Drake
- 2020/07/13 – 80 – Juice WRLD
- 2020/10/01 – 48 – Drake
- 2020/11/18 – 11 – Ariana Grande
- 2020/11/29 – 108 – Bad Bunny
2021 Popularity index leaders
Days at #1, start date, artist.
- 2021/03/17 – 12 – Drake
- 2021/03/29 – 54 – Justin Bieber
- 2021/05/23 – 10 – Drake
- 2021/06/02 – 1 – BTS
- 2021/06/02 – 18 – Olivia Rodrigo
- 2021/07/18 – 1 – BTS
- 2021/07/19 – 49 – Bad Bunny
- 2021/09/05 – 71 – Drake
- 2021/11/16 – 58 – Taylor Swift
2022 Popularity index leaders
Days at #1, start date, artist.
- 2022/01/13 – 29 – The Weeknd
- 2022/02/11 – 257 – Bad Bunny
- 2022/10/27 – 59 – Taylor Swift
- 2022/12/25 – 51 – Bad Bunny
2023 Popularity index leaders
Days at #1, start date, artist.
- 2023/02/15 – 11 – Taylor Swift
- 2023/02/25 – 22 – Bad Bunny
- 2023/03/19 – 242+ – Taylor Swift
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