Spotify's Top Songs, Artists and Podcasts of 2019

So, what did the world listen to in 2019 on Spotify?

This year, Post Malone claimed the spot of most-streamed artist with over 6.5 billion streams from fans around the globe. It’s the rapper-singer-songwriter’s first time topping Spotify’s Wrapped list, and he did it just 12 weeks after dropping his album Hollywood’s Bleeding (which also happens to be the second most-streamed album globally this year). His collaboration with Swae Lee on “Sunflower” from Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse rounded out the top three most-streamed songs of the year, which gives the artist a spot in each of our three major music categories (top artists, top songs, and top albums).

The second-most-streamed artist of the year is 17-year-old singer-songwriter and first time Grammy nominee Billie Eilish, who by now, definitely deserves that crown. In this year alone, she dropped her album WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP, WHERE DO WE GO? and surpassed 6 billion streams. The album has proven to be the top-streamed release of 2019, marking a milestone—Billie is the first female artist to have her album top the Wrapped most-streamed album category. Her dark staccato hit “bad guy” also ranks as the second-most-streamed song of the year.

Finally, Ariana Grande released her immensely popular album thank u, next in February, propelling her to number three on Spotify’s list of most-streamed-artists globally. Her song “7 rings” was also in the top five most streamed this year, giving Ariana a strong two years in the top 10 of Spotify’s Wrapped list. Listeners also showed Taylor Swift lots of love, making her the year’s third top-streamed female artist after her album Lover generated popular tracks like “ME!” and “You Need to Calm Down.”

This year was a big one for podcast growth on Spotify. There are now more than 500,000 podcast titles available, and our podcast audience has grown by more than 50% since the start of the year. We’ve also seen a 39% increase in podcast hours consumed by listeners quarter over quarter. People are clearly loving podcasts, tuning in the most to Spotify Original The Joe Budden Podcast with Rory and Mal, followed by My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark and Germany’s Gemischtes Hack. The most-streamed podcast genre of 2019 was comedy, showing that laughter is truly universal.