Most Streamed Artists of All Time

Introduction

I am interested in relationship between the top streaming artists and if they were a lead, solo, or feature on a song. I want to see how these factors relate to their total number of streams. I am curious if some artists are boosted because they are features on more popular artist’s songs. I also analyze just the top 10 artists and see how heavily they rely on collaboration or solo work.This data set deals with the number of streams for each artist, regardless of their role in the creation of the song.

I intend to use the data set I scraped to figure out the relationship between an artist’s role in a song and their total number of streams. I created a function that finds what percentage of an artist’s total streams they were the lead for. This function also converts the columns to numeric values as well as creates the new column previously mentioned. With this function, I was able to create a data frame to analyze.

The website can be found here: https://kworb.net/spotify/artists.html.

Daily Streams vs Total Streams

This scatterplot shows that there is a relationship between daily and total streams. Artists who have the highest streams each day tend to have total streams as well. However, there are artists with higher daily streams but less total streams than other artist, suggesting there are many artists growing in popularity. The four artists with the highest streams (both total and daily) are Drake, Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and The Weekend. These artists have a consistent and loyal fan base.

Streams as Lead vs Total Streams

The main goal with this plot was to see if artists who are successful at being leads also have a higher number of streams. We can see that the more successful an artist is an a lead, the more total streams they will have. This makes sense, as a majority of any given artist’s streams are from songs where they are the lead.

As Lead vs As Feature

While the y-axis may not look aesthetically pleasing, this scatter plot shows the relationship between steams where an artist is the lead vs when they are featured on a song. The top 10 artists (by total number of streams) are also included so we can see how how the top artists balance being the lead vs being featured on a song. As expected, the leaders in the industry tend to dominate being the lead on songs. We see some artists such as Ariana Grande or Eminem are featured on many more songs than artists like Kanye West or The Weekend.

Percentage of Streams as Lead Artist

Here we how often the top 10 artist are the lead artist. We see that Taylor Swift is the lead on over 95% of songs she appears in. Meanwhile, Drake is the top streamed artist, but he is the lead for only roughly 70% of those streams. Its interesting to see how often artists like to collaborate with each other, it’s clear some are more interested in it than others.

Which Top Artists Rely on Solo Work?

The graph above considered artists that collaborate with other artists. Meaning, even if they are the lead, they are still working with someone else. But what artists prefer to work solo? Artists like Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran do a lot of solo work, it makes up a vast majority of the discography. Travis Scott, Drake, Justin Bieber, and Bad Bunny are featured on a higher percentage of songs by other artists or feature other artists on their own songs.