BEHIND ALL THOSE NUMBERS
Rapper Drake wins the Spotify war, but what does that actually mean?
While critics prepare their “end of the decade” lists, Spotify released some cold, hard numbers showing what artists, songs and albums listeners streamed the most on its platform in the past 10 years. The results, while generally unsurprising, reflect the myriad ways streaming has shifted how “popularity” is both measured and attained.
Spotify’s most-streamed artist since 2010 is Drake, followed by Ed Sheeran, Post Malone, Ariana Grande and Eminem.
Of course Drake claimed the top spot. By gaming the streaming system, the rapper — with a boost from Spotify — engineered his own popularity.
One logical way to rack up numbers is to release more songs for fans to stream. Drake has released at least 179 songs on Spotify since 2010. The sheer output alone is astronomical, but Drake seems to have another trick up his sleeve: He creates soundscapes more than albums — sets of songs that bleed into each other, encouraging a listener to just let it ride.
That’s another important ingredient to attract streams. As The Washington Post’s pop music critic Chris Richards wrote back in 2017, “Streaming is designed to feel cool and undisruptive. It promises fluid, frictionless listening — an experience that can be entirely predictable, even when you don’t know exactly what’s coming next ... dominance belongs to those superstars willing to replicate their softness in abundance, and then roll it out on the streaming platforms — the way that Drake and The Weeknd have each done on their wildly successful, shamelessly overlong albums of late.”
These factors played an important role in why Drake’s longest and worst-reviewed record, the 25-track behemoth Scorpion, garnered a record-breaking 745.9 million U.S. streams in its first week and became the first record to globally generate one billion streams in a single week.
But it certainly didn’t hurt that Spotify inundated its platform with Drake’s face during promotion of the album. His image appeared in various places across the website, including as the promotional image for Spotify-curated playlists on which his music didn’t even appear.
The top female artists of the decade — Grande, Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Sia and Beyoncé — particularly reflect the fact that Spotify’s stats exist within a self-constructed reality. As a result, they do not necessarily represent what people are actually listening to. At first glance, for example, it may be surprising to learn that four female artists were streamed more often than Beyoncé, arguably the most culturally relevant pop star of the past 10 years. But if gaining Spotify streams is a sport, then it’s important to note Beyoncé wasn’t fully in the game for most of the decade; not all her music was on the service.
Notably, her 2016 smash hit Lemonade was only available on the subscription-only streaming service Tidal, of which she and husband Jay-z have partial ownership, for nearly three years. It didn’t reach Spotify until mid2019.
She even rapped about her disinterest on Nice, saying, “My success can’t be quantified / If I gave two f---s about streaming numbers / would have put Lemonade up on Spotify.”
So while people may look to Spotify’s end-of-the-decade list as an accurate roundup of what listeners have been consuming, in actuality, it might be misleading. While the data generally represent the pop-music landscape of the past 10 years, it also reflects how meaningless streaming numbers can be.