It’s a mark of the rhythms of the streaming that a full year after The Weeknd released his latest album ‘Dawn FM’, his Spotify metrics are going from strength to strength rather than dropping off.
We reported early this month on his ‘Blinding Lights’ overtaking Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ as the most-played track on Spotify at 3.33m streams. It’s now nudging 3.36bn. Now rankings-tracking firm Chart Data has hailed another record for The Weeknd: the most monthly listeners on Spotify.
That figure stood at 94.7 million listeners on Friday (12 January) when it was tweeted, but it’s nudged upwards since to 95.2 million at the time of writing. That means around a fifth of all Spotify listeners have streamed at least one The Weeknd track in the last month.
It also means The Weeknd’s Spotify audience is almost exactly double his following on Instagram (47.7 million) which offers a hint towards his casual listenership – people who hear his tracks on playlists but don’t necessarily consider themselves fans.
That’s backed up by data from ChartMetric, which shows 56.4 million people following The Weeknd’s profile on Spotify – a more active engagement signal.
This data also shows a spike on the release weekend of ‘Dawn FM to 80 million monthly listeners; falling back to around 75 million in the summer before recovering to nearly 79 million at the start of December. But it’s over the month since then that there has been a sharp and sustained rise.
You could call it the Spotify Wrapped effect, although a pair of new singles in December – ‘Creepin’ with Metro Boomin and 21 Savage, and ‘Nothing is Lost (You Give Me Strength’ from the soundtrack of the new Avatar movie – are also key.
In any case, The Weeknd may soon break the 100 million monthly listeners barrier on Spotify: a new milestone of scale in an industry where the idea of 100 million people using music streaming services – let alone listening to the same artist – once seemed like a pipedream.
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