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Methodology
This page provides you with up to date lists of the most streamed studio albums, per year, per decade and of all-time, on Spotify.
Singles that have been issued before the start of the selected period are thus included in full.
In case several versions of the same album exist, the one with the highest total of streams is displayed.
The column EAS stands for Equivalent Album Sales. It reflects the worth of these audio streams on par with album units. This data extrapolates remaining streaming platforms.
Hi! Why isn’t Love Yourself: Answer by BTS in the list of the most streams albums of all time? It has around 3,9B streams right now.. (LY: Answer -> https://open.spotify.com/album/2lATw9ZAVp7ILQcOKPCPqp?si=EjGdpiCZS7KVVq6MDRaumg)
Because it is a compilation album and only studio albums are included.
Hi! Shouldn’t Beyoncé’s HOMECOMIN be on most streamed of 2019?
It’s there now!
Thank you for the notice 🙂
“Pink Friday Roman Reloaded” has a full version called “Pink Friday Roman Reloaded + The Re-Up” with more streams. Beyoncé’s B-day has more than 1 billion streams, different from the posted count.
ps. HOMECOMING, by Beyoncé please!!!!!
Hi. This is a very interesting update, thank you.
Out of curiosity, for albums that not in the page, do you have to add each albums to their respective years manually, or will each year’s page be automatically updated after we search the artist’s page in the Spotify numbers tool?
Hi Firdaus!
It is a bit in-between: we automatically detect albums over 500 million streams thanks to user searches, but then we need to add them manually to the annual listings. The reason for this is that most albums have several versions so we need to manually identify which one we want to track, also there are a lot of compilations over the 500 million mark and we need to remove them.
Also When The Sun Goes Down should be added to 2011.
Where is Stars Dance by Selena Gomez?
Do any Madonna albums have a chance to appear in any year? Many of her songs have several versions in compilations, etc.
It depends how deep each year goes, if they go to Top 20s or 30s, then yes she will appear but I reckon she’ll struggle to get into most yearly Top 10s, with 86 or 89 the only possibilities.
At the moment, her most streamed album, 1984s Like A Virgin (including every remix, version etc) is on 416m streams, so quite a way of the #8 album, Princes Purple Rain on 587m.
you Only added Speak Now the Standard version, The deluxe edition is at 973,540,829 streams
I’m not 100% sure and I know there are many albums listed that are deluxe versions, but I think the intention is just to have the streaming numbers of tracks from the standard/original release. The other days I mentioned that a few album deluxe versions included tracks that were not originally on the standard album, as well as demos, remixes, live versions of tracks that were. I thought MJD would just remove the tracks not originally on the listed album and retain demos, remixes etc of tracks that were (as per how EAS is calculated) but instead he removed everything,… Read more »
Hi Martin! Here I’m fine adding deluxe editions which add outtakes and the likes. Since contemporary releases always add several tracks after some months, I feel it would be unfair to historical albums to not add as well their deluxe reissues which include similar ‘new’ songs, especially since they don’t bring that many streams anyway. What we do exclude are albums which contain hits from remaining albums like ‘Patience’ counted on AFD, these releases are excluded. The process on these pages is different from the one on the streaming tool. The tool recovers all distinct streams of an artist and… Read more »
please fix the Speak Now issue, every other album in the 2010s Page is the deluxe version
I thought it might be a case of all or nothing, if there is an outside track on the deluxe version.
This could be quite messy IMO, as while we are not exactly measuring oranges against apples, it does seem as though we are measuring Braeburns vs Coxs vs Granny Smiths, if you get what I mean.
Well I don’t really agree with this. When an album that barely came out has a deluxe reissue, we count it (see the last Demi or Bieber albums, they already have one). When an album is 3-12 months old (virtually 100% of the albums inside the 2020 list), we consider it valid. Why would a reissue out after 3-5-10-20 years be considered as not eligible? Because the “original tracklist” isn’t that one? When every successful album in music history came out in so many versions, I don’t think the myth of the original tracklist makes much sense tbh. Tons of… Read more »
I think you’ve missed my point. My point is that, not all albums listed will be equal, some will have super deluxe/deluxe etc versions included because the tracks are all versions of tracks originally on that album but albums like Appetite, lose all of it’s super deluxe tracks because their is no deluxe version to downgrade to and the results can’t just exclude tracks not directly or originally related to the album and retain the super deluxe tracks that do, we end up losing them all. On top of this (as you mention), they all exclude versions of their tracks… Read more »
Even if we decide to only count only the “original” version of an album will we still have issues like this I think.
There are several albums which only have a deluxe/extended/whatever version and not a “original”. This is especially true for many catalogue artists.
I do agree with MJD here, in my opinion does the current “criteria” give us the most comprehensive look. But it’s of course debatable.
I think you’ve also missed my point Al. My point is purely that, not all albums, that are included, are being measured equally. I guess it needs manual fixing, to ensure each album has every track assigned to it, that should be, as oppose to wiping entire deluxe versions, for the sake of a few rogue tracks or having to include them in full (with rogue tracks) because there is no other version or alternative, through restrictions on how the source data can be interrogated and what results can be generated. But it’s not the most comprehensive look. If you… Read more »
If manual adjustments like this (similar to the song ranking I guess) is doable it would be great. I’m just not sure how convenient that would be for 1k++ distinct releases.
Maybe MJD could expand on this.
Yes, I get that time and effort is the key to it all and in most cases it wont alter things that drastically but it still means not every album is equally represented, some will have higher streams than they should, some will have lesser streams than they should have, while some will of course be exactly correct.
Oh indeed, I misunderstood what you meant! It would be possible to cherry-pick songs to exclude rather than entire releases (like removing Patience from the AFD reissue). The way to do it is easy, setting up a list of excluded song IDs per album IDs and ‘validating’ each song before adding it to the breakdown. The two main constraints are: – that would take an immense manual effort to look at every song from a reissue (some have 50+ songs) to know which are legitimate and which aren’t, to exclude the pack as soon as one is incorrect makes it… Read more »
can you add trilogy by the weeknd please. thanks!
Are these lists complete/accurate or there might be albums that are still missing? Thanks for your hard work!
We’re still adding a lot of albums, but the higher ranks should be fairly complete