For music fans, December is always partly defined by statistics, thanks to the annual Spotify Wrapped round-up that just landed on millions of homepages. The yearly opportunity to learn how many times you obsessively streamed your favorite songs, how much your children ruined your profile, and exactly who you are as a person, as defined by your tastes, is catnip for musical stattos. It's been an inspired move by Spotify since it launched 10 years ago.
This year's Spotify Wrapped marked a dramatic shift in one major way from 2023's edition. While the overall top streamed artist list again had more male artists, all five of the biggest-streamed albums were released by women. Alongside Taylor Swift's The Tortured Poets Department, Billie Eilish’s third album Hit Me Hard took second spot, Sabrina Carpenter’s Short 'n Sweet came in third, with Colombian artist Karol G’s Mañana Será Bonito in fourth and Ariana Grande’s Eternal Sunshine rounding out the top 5.
2024 saw emerging artists like Carpenter and Chappell Roan bringing more competition, but ultimately, as the Era's Tour comes to an end, it's been Taylor Swift's year.
Taylor Swift Won Spotify Wrapped (Again)
Breaking Down Taylor Swift's Phenomenal 2024
Not only is Taylor Swift the top streamed artists of 2024 on Spotify, but she also picked up top streamed album for The Tortured Poets Department. Impressively, two other Taylor Swift albums hit the top 10, with 1989 (Taylor's Version) at number 6 and Lover at 8. She's also the first female artist to win consecutive top streamed artist awards (and was the first ever to win outright), and now sits level with Ed Sheeran on 2 wins, behind Drake and Bad Bunny on 3.
Key Background Facts
- Taylor Swift released only one album in 2024, after two Taylor's Version releases in 2023
- Swift topped Spotify's artist of the year in 2023
- Only two artists have scored consecutive Spotify Wrapped artists of the year: Swift and Bad Bunny
Swift was streamed a huge 26.6 billion times, 500 thousand times more than in 2023. That's an average of more than 72 million streams for every day of the year. Remarkably, according to Spotify's monthly charts, she managed the feat without being the top streamed artist for a single month of 2024. That trend previously also happened between 2019 and 2022, as none of the most streamed artists of the year topped the monthly listeners list.
2025 Will See Swift Hit An Incredible Spotify Streaming Milestone
Taylor Swift Could Become The First Solo Artist To Break An Eye-Watering Record
So what's next for Taylor Swift? The Era's Tour ends on December 8, 2024, closing out a mammoth chapter of her career, that has seen her hit almost unprecedented personal highs. She still has two Taylor's Version albums to release, and somewhere in there, attention will turn to both a new album to follow The Tortured Poets Department and (presumably) a smaller-scale tour. Both are most likely to happen after the end of 2025. But next year could still see reason to celebrate.
Swift's current total streams on Spotify sits at 94,668,676,692 (via Chartmasters) as a solo artist, and just over 95.5 billion including tracks where she features alongside another lead. That means sometime in the first half of 2025, Taylor Swift will hit 100 billion streams on Spotify, which would potentially see her hit the milestone as the first solo artist ever.
Her closest rival Drake has technically already hit 100 billion streams, but almost 25 billion of his streams come as a featured artist on other people's songs. As a solo artist, he's lagging behind on 81,407,301,096 streams. Unless Drake flips the trend, and people simply stop listening to Taylor Swift in 2025, she will surely become the first artist to ever hit the 100 billion streams milestone.