1.6 billion streams in the past year
An artist with over 1.6 billion Spotify streams in the past year shows that the majority of streams come from fans’ own playlists and libraries, not editorial playlists. Only 13% of listeners are active but they generate over 80% of monthly streams.
By Andrew Southworth
Hey friends!
Today we’re going to look at Spotify for Artists data for an artist with over 1.6 billion streams in the past year.
Unfortunately I can’t share the name of the artist. But I thought you’d find it interesting to see data for an artist this massive. They’re in the top 300 most streamed artists on Spotify right now.
This is over the last 12 months.
The first thing I was interested in, was what does their streaming source breakdown look like over the last 12 months.
this is streams in the last 12 months
I somewhat expected that editorial playlists would make up a huge chunk. But here you can see editorial and personalized editorial combined are only 1/3rd of algorithmic by itself.
It seems the vast majority is recurring fans in the form of ‘listeners own playlists and library’. This makes sense, these are people that have saved and added songs to their personal playlists - the actual fans. The next category is ‘artist profile and catalog’ which is mostly fans searching out the artist by name or clicking links to their music.
The next interesting data point (which is very much related to the previous topic) I noticed is that only about 13% of their audience is considered ‘active audience’. However, these active listeners represent over 80% of their monthly streams. This is why their ‘listeners own playlist and library’ and ‘artist profile and catalog’ was such a huge chunk - these listeners listen to the artist a lot more.
In fact, their Streams / Listener over the past 12 months is over 19 streams per listener.
This is incredibly high for ‘regular’ vocal-led music. The only other music that gets higher than this is sleep / relaxing / lofi / instrumental music.
The last thing I want to point out is that this artist gets over 110 million streams per month. This represents over $300,000 USD in Spotify royalties per month, likely even higher because this artist’s largest two countries are the USA and the UK which pay higher per stream than average.
Of course, they’re signed to a major record label so we have no idea what the artist is actually getting.
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