The Guardian has run an interesting music-data piece comparing the 20 top-selling singles of all time’s Spotify streams against the top 20 tracks on Spotify’s streams.
It notes that there is “no crossover… none whatsoever” between the two lists. Not such a huge surprise. But we’ve been kicking the data around since reading the piece to see what else we can glean.
For example, Spotify’s 20 biggest tracks – from Major Lazer’s ‘Lean On’ with its 718.3m streams to Maroon 5’s ‘Sugar’ with its 424.7m streams – have been played just over 10bn times on the service so far.
Which, if Spotify’s own claimed average payout of $0.006 – $0.0084 still holds, indicates total payouts for these 20 songs alone of between $60m and $84m.
If we can assume Spotify has at least passed $4bn of payouts since its launch in 2008 – it reached $2bn in November 2014 and $3bn in June 2015 – that would suggest that its top 20 tracks have accounted for 1.8% of its total rightsholder payments.
(That last calculation is necessarily fuzzy, of course, as is the assumption that the average payout has stayed the same since it was published by Spotify in December 2013.)
Still, the 10bn streams of the service’s top 20 tracks is a hard statistic – and an interesting one. Here’s the full list of the top 20:
| Song | Streams |
| 1. Major Lazer – Lean On | 718,315,540 |
| 2. Ed Sheeran– Thinking Out Loud | 630,589,381 |
| 3. Omi – Cheerleader (Felix Jaehn vs Salaam Remi Remix) | 608,896,552 |
| 4. Justin Bieber – What Do You Mean? | 569,538,052 |
| 5. Mark Ronson – Uptown Funk | 557,058,464 |
| 6. Justin Bieber – Sorry | 556,078,373 |
| 7. Hozier – Take Me to Church | 518,441,726 |
| 8. The Weeknd – Can’t Feel My Face | 505,120,842 |
| 9. Wiz Khalifa – See You Again (feat Charlie Puth) | 497,481,621 |
| 10. Skrillex – Where Are Ü Now (feat. Justin Bieber) | 494,814,174 |
| 11. Sam Smith – Stay With Me | 468,570,865 |
| 12. Ellie Goulding – Love Me Like You Do | 457,042,331 |
| 14. Sia – Chandelier | 446,014,731 |
| 13. Clean Bandit – Rather Be | 437,323,891 |
| 15. Imagine Dragons – Radioactive | 435,755,132 |
| 18. Passenger – Let Her Go | 430,165,456 |
| 17. John Legend – All of Me | 425,322,666 |
| 20. Maroon 5 – Sugar | 424,743,829 |
| 16. Avicii – Wake Me Up | 420,918,963 |
| 19. Pharrell Williams – Happy | 413,408,204 |
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