Most popular artists on Spotify
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 12/05/23Rank | Artist | Popularity | Weekly +/- | Daily Streams | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Taylor Swift | 100 | = | 90,677,927 | |
2 | Bad Bunny | 95 | = | 40,560,089 | |
3 | Drake | 95 | = | 38,499,548 | |
4 | The Weeknd | 93 | +1 | 36,216,692 | |
5 | Peso Pluma | 90 | = | 26,703,102 | |
6 | Travis Scott | 90 | = | 18,818,364 | |
7 | Kanye West | 89 | = | 21,792,176 | |
8 | Feid | 89 | +1 | 20,558,294 | |
9 | Jung Kook | 89 | = | 16,978,920 | |
10 | Arijit Singh | 88 | = | 1,183,154,403 | |
11 | Eminem | 88 | = | 23,149,044 | |
12 | Lana Del Rey | 88 | = | 20,536,661 | |
13 | Karol G | 88 | = | 20,200,494 | |
14 | Junior H | 88 | = | 20,028,091 | |
15 | 21 Savage | 88 | +1 | 9,632,155 | |
16 | Justin Bieber | 87 | = | 19,890,562 | |
17 | Olivia Rodrigo | 87 | = | 17,026,467 | |
18 | SZA | 87 | = | 15,594,472 | |
19 | Rihanna | 87 | = | 14,622,059 | |
20 | Future | 87 | = | 8,658,463 | |
21 | Ariana Grande | 87 | +1 | -233,409,603 | |
22 | Fuerza Regida | 86 | = | 16,590,436 | |
23 | Billie Eilish | 86 | = | 16,279,515 | |
24 | Coldplay | 86 | = | 15,651,827 | |
25 | Metro Boomin | 86 | +1 | 15,411,859 | |
26 | Ed Sheeran | 86 | = | 14,983,897 | |
27 | Post Malone | 86 | = | 14,501,472 | |
28 | Bruno Mars | 86 | = | 14,059,104 | |
29 | Doja Cat | 86 | = | 13,305,567 | |
30 | Zach Bryan | 86 | = | 13,089,733 | |
31 | Kendrick Lamar | 86 | = | 11,862,139 | |
32 | Pritam | 85 | = | 16,474,933 | |
33 | Natanael Cano | 85 | = | 13,909,822 | |
34 | Dua Lipa | 85 | = | 12,440,515 | |
35 | BTS | 85 | = | 12,299,035 | |
36 | Imagine Dragons | 85 | +1 | 11,918,160 | |
37 | Juice WRLD | 85 | = | 11,862,280 | |
38 | Morgan Wallen | 85 | = | 11,667,085 | |
39 | Rauw Alejandro | 85 | = | 11,291,845 | |
40 | David Guetta | 85 | = | 11,010,486 | |
41 | Anuel Aa | 85 | = | 9,985,633 | |
42 | Myke Towers | 85 | = | 9,906,848 | |
43 | Chris Brown | 85 | = | 9,400,423 | |
44 | J. Cole | 85 | +1 | 8,899,153 | |
45 | Arctic Monkeys | 84 | = | 12,339,738 | |
46 | Shakira | 84 | = | 9,843,836 | |
47 | Ozuna | 84 | = | 8,726,620 | |
48 | Lil Baby | 84 | = | 7,585,697 | |
49 | Nicki Minaj | 84 | = | 7,260,177 | |
50 | Lil Wayne | 84 | = | 4,941,993 |
Want to check the detailed streaming numbers for one artist?

We have more for you


… and all of our streaming tops and tools
And check our streaming lab here to know more about all of our tops.