Guinness World Records (GWR) have announced the world’s ‘Most Popular Artist’ and it’s not even close.
Using Spotify data, such as the number of monthly listeners, GWR has named The Weeknd as the artist at the top of the world.
The Canadian singer, real name Abel Tesfaye, has 112 million people bumping his tunes every month. He’s the first and only artist to pass the 100 million threshold and is almost 30 million clear of the next most popular artist, Miley Cyrus (83 million). Wonder if this has anything to do with the number of people getting The Weeknd on when they themselves are getting it on, if you know what I'm saying.
“The Weeknd’s surging streaming figures come on the back of the release of his “Die For You” remix featuring Ariana Grande, which went viral on TikTok,” GWR wrote.
“The track peaked at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming the seventh number-one hit for both The Weeknd and Grande respectively.”
After The Weeknd and Miley comes Ariana Grande (82.5 million), Shakira (82.1 million), Taylor Swift (80.7 million), Rihanna (77.8 million), and Ed Sheeran (77.5 million).
The Weeknd has four songs with over 1 billion streams on the music streaming service. ‘Blinding Lights’ is his most popular song with 3,482,176,332 streams. ‘Starboy’ is next with 2,30,525,604, followed by ‘Save Your Tears’ (1,326,960,907) and ‘The Hills’ (1,066,550,369).
Besides from being the first/only artist with over 100 million monthly listeners, Abel also has the GWRs for ‘the most streamed album on Spotify in 2015’ for ‘Beauty Behind the Madness’ and ‘most consecutive weeks in the Top 10 of Billboard’s Hot 100 by a male artist’ (45 weeks from March 7, 2015, to January 9, 2016).
‘Dawn FM’ is The Weeknd’s most recent project. Released in 2022 it’s his fifth studio album and was met with wide critical acclaim. Billboard ranked it as the eighth-best album of 2022, Complex had it at number six, and The Guardian had it at number three.
