Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” set a Spotify record for the number of auditions in one week, with more than 100 million listens on the platform.
Today Spotify turned to social networks to talk about the large number of streams that “Flowers” can boast of, which Miley Cyrus released last Thursday. The main single from the upcoming eighth studio album of the 30-year-old artist “Flowers” at the time of writing this article scored 101.84 million listens on Spotify.
And attracting a wide variety of listeners during the first seven days when it was available to fans, “Flowers” became “the most popular song in one week in the history of Spotify,” the Stockholm—based platform emphasized.
As expected, given its strong results, “Flowers” also ranks first on several official Spotify playlists, including “Today’s Top Hits,” which has nearly 33 million subscribers. Needless to say, this noticeable positioning will continue to stimulate the growth of track streaming, which was also facilitated by a series of Spotify billboards in places with a large volume of traffic and a push from competing services.
But time will tell if the early momentum of “Flowers” will attract enough listeners in the long run to propel the track above Cyrus’ other well-known releases in terms of total listening.
For example, 2017’s “Malibu” has more than 693 million listens on Spotify, compared to an estimated 776 million listens for “We Can’t Stop” (2013) and a staggering 1.09 billion listens for “Party in the USA.” (2009).
More broadly, Spotify has a larger user base than ever, with 456 million monthly active users, including 195 million subscribers at the end of the third quarter of 2022. (The company’s earnings report for the fourth quarter of 2022 is scheduled to be published on January 31.)
These users contribute to a record number of new streams, especially in favor (due to the corresponding multitude of fans tuned to trends) of debut tracks such as “Flowers”. Looking back at Spotify and on-demand streams received from all services, reports point to 5.3 trillion global streams (an increase of 25.6 percent year-on-year) and 1.3 trillion streams in the US in 2022 (an increase of 12.2 percent year-on-year).
Taking into account these statistics, Mariah Carey broke the Spotify streaming world record in one day at the end of December with the song “All I Want for Christmas Is You”, which scored 21.27 million listenings on the platform in the 24 hours under review.
And by early 2023, The Weeknd’s song “Blinding Lights” had supplanted Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You” and became the most listened-to song in Spotify history. While the revenue associated with millions of streams remains significant, the payout model used by Spotify and others means that a significant number of talented artists (including professionals with devoted fans) earn very little from streaming fees.
Consequently, some of these artists leave Spotify altogether, and many advertise as a preferred alternative a model based on fan support, according to which royalties are distributed among artists in proportion to the actual listening by each user.
