Chartmaster did a list of most streamed spotify artist in 2024
Taylor Swift dominated Spotify once again in 2024, with 28.21 billion streams. Canadians The Weeknd and Drake complete the top 3.
chartmasters.org
in the comment-section users aksed for a list for legacy artist and the answer:
Posted by: @dan
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In articles like these, I'm always missing the legacy artists list.
Understand that 100%! Truth is, with streaming lists, I always struggle to define what's "Legacy" or not. I know we listen to artists from the same generation, it would be easy to keep calling legacy pre-2000 artists, but wouldn't Eminem be legacy already? Weirdly enough, 50 Cent feels more legacy than Em' while he started after him.
When I started studying music industry numbers over 20 years ago, Jackson or Collins were already seen as legacy for example, by that standard Eminem should already be too. And then, what do we do about One Direction? 4 billion streams in 2024 for them, disbanded for nearly a decade, with one member who already passed away. As crazy as it seems, it's difficult to
not call them legacy. Still, 2000s and even more so 2010s artists are at an advantage when compared to pre-2000 artists in terms of streams. And then, we see artists like Elton John or Madonna getting tracks at 1b+ thanks to the contribution of contemporary artists.
Anyway, don't take these numbers for granted (for these I didn't check if Spotify added/removed some tracks or so during the year to adjust the number), but these are the biggest 'deep legacy' artists for 2024:
1 Queen 3.64b
2 The Beatles 3.48b
3 Michael Jackson 2.83b
4 Elton John 2.75b
5 Luis Miguel 2.74b
6 Red Hot Chili Peppers 2.73b
7 A.R. Rahman 2.56b
8 AC/DC 2.55b
9 Nirvana 2.45b
10 Radiohead 2.45b
(11 Metallica 2.45b)
12 Fleetwood Mac 2.32b
13 Bob Marley 2.26b
14 Creedence Clearwater Revival 2.22b
15 Green Day 2.21b
16 ABBA 2.08b
17 Madonna 1.94b
18 Mariah Carey 1.77b
19 Guns N' Roses 1.73b
20 2Pac 1.70b
It will be interesting to see how things evolve, as right now The Beatles are doing better than Queen (42.47m vs 41.32m over the first 5 days of 2025) as the latter group continues to slide a bit from its huge boost in 2018.