Taylor Swift Dethroned By The Most Unlikely Musician
We’d say that Taylor Swift is having a moment, but at this point, that moment has been going on for a very long time. And just this year, the singer released a brand new hit album (The Tortured Poets Department) while continuing her insanely successful Eras Tour. Because of that, you might think she is one of the most listened-to musical artists in the entire world, but you’d be wrong: not only is she not the number one most listened-to artist on Spotify, but she recently lost her #3 slot to Bruno Mars.
Shake It Off
While they are hardly the only game in town, Spotify is arguably the most popular and prominent music streaming app. Its own popularity makes it a great way to gauge the popularity of various artists, and Spotify is very transparent about where the top 500 artists from around the world rank. For a time, Taylor Swift has been very solidly in third place, coming in behind two other very popular singers: The Weeknd at #2 and Billie Eilish at #1.
Grenade
In turn, Bruno Mars has been trailing in fourth place behind Taylor Swift. Recently, though, that changed. As of this writing, he has 97,023,661 monthly listeners compared to her 94,794,122 monthly listeners. While that’s obviously a very slim lead, the numbers do reveal something very surprising about the general worldwide popularity of Taylor Swift versus Bruno Mars.
Compared to the previous month, Swift lost 1,278,956 of her monthly listeners. That is admittedly a drop in the bucket for someone as popular as her, and normally, a loss of this amount would not have threatened her general musical dominance. However, Bruno Mars gained 25,137,401 listeners compared to last month, which means that he gained nearly 20 times as many listeners as Swift lost.
Locked Out Of Heaven
On the surface, the disparity between Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars seems nearly unbelievable…after all, she just released a hit new album this year, and his last solo album was way back in 2016. Plus, while Mars has his own world tour going, it has been much smaller in scope and generated far less buzz than Swift’s. What, then, caused him to get such a powerful increase in monthly listeners?
Die With A Smile
At a glance, it looks like the key to his success has been the song that he and Lady Gaga collaborated on: “Die With a Smile.” It turns out that Mars and his Joker 2 star Gaga are quite the collaborative team, and their song (which was released August 16, 2024) quickly hit the top of the Billboard Global 200 in its first week and was the number one song that week on iTunes, Apple Music, and Spotify.
Notably, the song was streamed 97 million times that first week alone, and while those obviously didn’t all come from Spotify, the sheer popularity of this song helps explain why Taylor Swift got so “swiftly” dethroned by Bruno Mars on the popular music streaming app.
Uptown Funk
Only time will tell, of course, if Taylor Swift will gain her place back or Bruno Mars will stay winning. Of course, he has his own new album and subsequent tour in the works, so she might very well continue to lose ground to her talented rival. Swift can’t really say she wasn’t warned about the prospect that she had already hit her hallelujah, though…as Mars has so eloquently reminded us, uptown funk is gonna give it to you.
