Forget Album Sales. The Way to Track Artists Today is Spotify Stats
About a year ago I was talking to my friend Windex about a recent musical obsession, an early 90s alt-country band called Uncle Tupelo. I was in the middle of explaining how influential they were when his daughter looked them up on Spotify, and found they had fewer than 300,000 monthly listeners.
In other words, borderline irrelevant.
The idea of ranking musicians by Spotify stats had never occurred to me before. And since I’m a perfectly normal person who does perfectly normal things in his spare time, I decided to do a bit of a deep dive on classic rock artists and glean from the data what I could.
Let me be clear: I am well aware that Monthly Listeners, like all statistics, is deeply flawed. It doesn’t factor how many songs are listened to, or how many hours. It doesn't capture how many people are listening on other streaming platforms, or on other mediums. It is quite simply the number of unique individuals who listened to that artist that month on that streaming platform.
But it is not, like Uncle Tupelo, irrelevant. Streaming gives us meaningful metrics about what people are choosing to listen to. Before streaming, record sales was the best metric we had. But just because you bought that O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack, it didn't mean you were throwing it on the turntable every day. To compare artists who were at their peak 20 or 30 or even 60 years ago, to see how many people are listening to them today, means something.
Not artistic value, I’ll grant you. But here’s the thing about artistic longevity: the really good stuff holds up. Shakespeare may have been fighting Christopher Marlowe for the attention of London playgoers in the 1590s, but half a millennium later it’s no fight at all. Moby Dick, Mozart, Michelangelo – artistic greatness persists.
And rock and roll as an art form is now old enough that maybe, just maybe, seeing who people (or at least, Spotify subscribers) are actually listening to is at least interesting, and possibly meaningful.
Or maybe it’s just a fun way for me to spend an evening!
A Word About Methodology
This is a snapshot in time: particularly, the day of February 1, 2023. Every statistic presented here is the Monthly Listeners (MLs, from now on) of a particular artist on that day.
My criteria was rock artists whose first album was released before I graduated college in 1988. An arbitrary date, for sure, but it just worked out that way. I started with the biggies – Beatles, Stones, Zeppelin, etc. I looked at solo artists like Billy Joel and Bruce. I kept digging until I ended up with 30 artists. These are not necessarily the top 30, but close enough. You won’t see Rush or Grateful Dead or CSNY or other popular acts, because they tended to have numbers that were neither interesting or surprising (generally in the low single digit millions). But you will see, for example, various members of the Beatles as solo artists, because their individual numbers tell us something about the enduring popularity of the biggest and most important rock and roll band.
To give you a little context, here are the monthly listeners of the Top 3 artists on Spotify right now:
1. The Weeknd 97m
2. Taylor Swift 79m
3. Ed Sheeran 77m
The top Classic Rock artist is in 40th place today, with 48 million MLs. The Beatles, with 27 million monthly listeners, are sandwiched in 120th place between Em Beihold and DJ Snake*.
* Before you think this is a Sign of the Apocalypse, remember two things: 1) Millions of older folk are still listening to CDs and their iTunes library, so Spotify Monthly Listeners is far more likely to undercount older acts than they are to undercount, say, Mr. Snake. Also, I’m pretty sure those two artists won’t be doing as well as the Beatles 52 years after their last recording.
My list of 30 artists is at the bottom. But first - some observations.
Captain Fantastic
You will probably be surprised to hear the list is topped by… Sir Elton John, with 48 million Monthly Listeners!
But I think that is a fluke. His top-streamed song, by far, is "Cold Heart (Pnau remix)", a 2021 hit. Pnau, as I’m sure you all know, is a trio of Australian producers who took a trio of Elton John songs from the 70s, added some vocals from the English-Albanian singer Dua Lipa, and produced a monster hit.
It's quite good. But the timing of this hit has Sir Elton much higher on the list, methinks, than he normally might be. If I was doing this little experiment in 2015, when Paul McCartney was topping the charts with "FourFiveSeconds", his collaboration with Rihanna and Kanye, the numbers would have been similarly skewed. So you’ll forgive me, I hope, if I declare the true Classic Rock Spotify Monthly Listeners crown goes where crowns often sit, on the head of the...
Queen!
With 42m MLs, Queen has nearly as many listeners as The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined. Nearly 7 times more than The Who. Two and a half times more than U2. What the what?
Yes, the movie Bohemian Rhapsody won Oscars and put them back on the map, but that was in 2018. A lot has changed in the world since then! You might be equally surprised to hear that their most listened to song, by far, isn’t "We Are The Champions" or “We Will Rock You" or even "Another One Bites the Dust". It is "Don’t Stop Me Now’, which has more than twice as many listeners as any song produced by any of the artists in the paragraph above. Color me shocked.
Oh, and if you're wondering how the King did...Elvis Presley has 17 million Monthly Listeners. Not bad when you consider most of his surviving fans have no idea what Spotify is.
The World Makes Sense Again
Once you get past the first two anomalies on the list, the world regains its normalcy with The Beatles, who as usual beat all of their British Invasion rivals, with 27m listeners. It’s also worth noting that Paul McCartney (10.7m), John Lennon (10.6m), and George Harrison (7.3m) all have respectable numbers. Indeed double those of Rush and the Grateful Dead. Heck, even Ringo has a million MLs.
Fleetwood Mac vs. The Eagles
The two California-based 70s bands with colorful backstories and monster albums both did well – but it’s Fleetwood Mac with the easy win. They are 4th on my list, with 25m MLs. The Eagles are back in 15th place, with a very respectable 18m.
Heavy Metal Still Rules
How about this: the next 3 artists on the list, all with roughly 24m MLs, are AC/DC, Guns ‘N Roses, and Metallica. All of them rather easily beat Led Zeppelin (17m), their spiritual forerunner, and a band that was much bigger in their prime than any of these 3 (with the possible exception of AC/DC). Most surprising to me is GNR, given how small their discography is.
The King of New Jersey
The growing popularity and respectability of Bon Jovi is one of the mysteries of our times. This was a cheesy hair band, a less menacing version of Motley Crue. And now he’s* beloved and respected and in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame? Warren Zevon can’t get in but this dude with the stone-washed denim jeans and frosted tips feathered hair writing cringey high school poetry lyrics can?
Well, it’s worse than you thought: his Spotify MLs (24m) are significantly higher than Bruce Springsteen (14m). Now look, if I'm in a bar and "Living on a Prayer" comes on I'm going to sing along about Tommy and Gina as loudly as the next guy. But seriously, how did we allow this to happen?
On a related note, Bruce also lost the Battle of the Tri-State Troubadors: Billy Joel’s 13th place finish edged out The Boss, too.
* Yes, I am aware that I'm slipping back and forth between 'they' and 'he' as if I'm not sure if Bon Jovi is a person or a band. That's because I'm not sure and I don't care enough to find out.
Random Notes
- Tom Petty (solo) beat Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Petty had 18 Top 100 Billboard hits with the Heartbreakers, and only 7 without them. He released 13 studio albums with the Heartbreakers and 3 without them. I consider this an upset. (bonus fact: Petty’s biggest hit was actually released on a Stevie Nicks album ("Stop Dragging My Heart Around". Put differently, Stevie Nick’s' biggest hit was written by Tom Petty.)
- Creedence Clearwater Revival existed for 4 years. But they have more MLs than Bob Dylan, The Allman Brothers, and The Who…combined!
- Another shocker: Aerosmith just missed out on the Top 10, but still easily beat the likes of U2 and Pink Floyd.
- Perhaps the saddest thing on the list is The Who. I always considered them one of the Big Four (along with Beatles, Stones, and Zep). Alas, today, they can barely beat out George Harrison’s solo work.
- And finally: in the skirmish between Southern Rock bands, my beloved Lynyrd Skynyrd absolutely trounced the far more respected Allman Brothers. I guess if you stick around for 30 years making one shitty record after another, it keeps those listeners rolling. Maybe Neil Young (who has 2m fewer listeners than Neil Diamond) was wrong: it’s better to fade away than to burn out.
1 Elton John 47,734,430
2 Queen 42,222,980
3 The Beatles 27,523,606
4 Fleetwood Mac 24,893,393
5 AC/DC 24,418,378
6 Guns N' Roses 24,386,262
7 Metallica 24,384,583
8 Bon Jovi 22,734,657
9 The Rolling Stones 22,156,356
10 CCR 21,557,748
11 Aerosmith 21,404,458
12 The Police 20,126,177
13 Billy Joel 19,299,273
14 U2 18,568,809
15 The Eagles 18,281,069
16 Elvis Presley 17,386,843
17 Pink Floyd 17,354,383
18 Led Zeppelin 17,289,419
19 Bruce Springsteen 14,327,632
20 Lynyrd Skynyrd 13,011,316
21 The Clash 10,760,711
22 Paul McCartney 10,754,194
23 John Lennon 10,650,950
24 The Beach Boys 10,142,970
25 Bob Dylan 9,267,357
26 Tom Petty 8,187,505
27 The Who 7,415,837
28 George Harrison 7,359,429
29 Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 6,262,043
30 The Allman Brothers 3,999,466
