Most popular artists on Spotify (daily update)

How do you know which artists are the most popular on Spotify? Monthly listeners hardly tell you the truth of it and Spotify’s popularity index alone isn’t so easy to read. We are shading a lot on this key indicator for you.

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 as 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, this index is key as it’s used as part of algorithms which create and update playlists, bringing a huge value for artists. The highest the popularity index of an artist, the more visible he will get on Spotify.

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 noted 90 gains a lot 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 he is consistent by himself. 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

Top 50 most popular artists on Spotify

Last updated on 12/06/23

Rank		Popularity	Weekly +/-	Daily Streams
1	Taylor Swift	100	=	97,482,397
2	Drake	95	=	44,926,552
3	Bad Bunny	95	=	44,229,542
4	The Weeknd	93	+1	39,805,764
5	Travis Scott	90	=	21,796,246
6	Peso Pluma	90	=	-446,722,356
7	Kanye West	89	=	25,389,831
8	Feid	89	+1	23,744,272
9	Jung Kook	89	=	18,180,049
10	Arijit Singh	88	=	92,115,801
11	Eminem	88	=	25,189,532
12	Lana Del Rey	88	=	22,885,193
13	Karol G	88	=	22,423,915
14	Junior H	88	=	20,779,046
15	21 Savage	88	=	11,326,115
16	Ariana Grande	87	=	279,444,185
17	Justin Bieber	87	=	20,527,702
18	SZA	87	=	17,526,719
19	Rihanna	87	=	16,261,792
20	Olivia Rodrigo	87	=	12,571,033
21	Future	87	=	10,155,728
22	Billie Eilish	86	=	18,255,383
23	Metro Boomin	86	+1	17,796,392
24	Fuerza Regida	86	=	16,587,974
25	Coldplay	86	=	16,576,212
26	Post Malone	86	=	16,473,961
27	Ed Sheeran	86	=	15,632,770
28	Zach Bryan	86	=	15,481,099
29	Bruno Mars	86	=	14,930,013
30	Doja Cat	86	=	14,481,406
31	Kendrick Lamar	86	=	13,982,108
32	Pritam	85	=	16,761,637
33	Dua Lipa	85	=	14,115,769
34	Natanael Cano	85	=	13,992,827
35	Imagine Dragons	85	+1	13,482,767
36	BTS	85	=	13,419,326
37	Morgan Wallen	85	=	13,322,471
38	Carin Leon	85	+1	12,934,313
39	Juice WRLD	85	=	12,824,930
40	Anuel Aa	85	=	11,043,797
41	Myke Towers	85	=	11,020,243
42	Chris Brown	85	=	10,639,990
43	J. Cole	85	+1	10,560,193
44	David Guetta	85	=	-51,038,511
45	Rauw Alejandro	85	=	-630,579,272
46	$uicideBoy$	84	=	11,769,246
47	Quevedo	84	=	11,424,296
48	Grupo Frontera	84	=	11,332,944
49	Lil Baby	84	=	9,023,896
50	Anirudh Ravichander	84	=	-295,872,355

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