What Is a Good Spotify Popularity Score? What 220,239 Artists' Scores Mean in Monthly Listeners

The median artist on Spotify sits at a popularity score of 24. A 30 is about 42,000 monthly listeners, a 40 about 160,000, a 50 about 580,000, a 60 about 2 million. Every ten points is roughly 3 to 4 times the audience, and only one artist in ten clears 50. That is the whole translation table, computed from the latest reading on each of 220,239 artists in our database, and the rest of this post is the detail: what the number tracks, how fast it moves, and why your track's score goes down while its stream count goes up.

A producer I work with sent me a screenshot last week, the Spotify for Artists page with the little popularity number circled, and the message was "is 31 good." I didn't know. Nobody knows, because Spotify publishes the score as a 0 to 100 and says it is based on recent plays, and that's the entire documentation. So I went and counted. After 20 years and 19 Billboard Top 20 albums I have stopped trusting any number I can't see the distribution of, and this one turns out to have a very clean one.

The Translation Table

Latest reading per artist, 220,239 artists with a popularity score between 0 and 100 and a monthly-listener count on the same day. Listeners, followers, playlist count and playlist reach are medians inside each band; the brackets are the middle half.

Popularity	Artists	Share	Monthly listeners (median, middle half)	Followers	Playlists	Playlist reach
0 to 9	47,980	21.8%	485 (120 to 1,147)	1,195	243	58,155
10 to 19	42,652	19.4%	4,452 (2,785 to 7,118)	3,208	994	160,447
20 to 29	43,339	19.7%	19,355 (12,632 to 29,384)	6,670	2,452	369,528
30 to 39	37,987	17.2%	71,641 (46,769 to 109,104)	15,710	5,583	908,298
40 to 49	25,915	11.8%	259,615 (171,221 to 393,562)	46,344	13,588	2,440,194
50 to 59	14,554	6.6%	919,786 (600,466 to 1,389,910)	145,695	30,544	6,401,130
60 to 69	5,857	2.7%	2,975,430 (1,898,505 to 4,655,220)	594,559	71,991	18,321,850
70 to 79	1,590	0.7%	9,773,362 (6,134,068 to 15,088,309)	2,775,124	183,609	59,955,770
80 to 100	365	0.2%	30,441,889 (18,623,357 to 45,130,934)	12,004,825	638,248	211,610,459

The exact points, for the person holding the screenshot: pop 10 is a median 2,333 monthly listeners, pop 20 is 10,954, pop 30 is 41,718, pop 40 is 159,706, pop 50 is 580,134, pop 60 is 2,024,520, pop 70 is 6,347,155, pop 80 is 19,100,854. The step from one ten to the next is 3.8x, 3.8x, 3.6x, 3.5x, 3.1x, 3.0x as you climb. It's a log scale wearing a percentage's clothes.

And the other direction, because that's usually the real question. If you have 1,000 to 2,000 monthly listeners, your score is most likely 8 (middle half 6 to 10, from 14,306 artists). At 10,000 to 20,000 listeners it's 22 (20 to 25). At 100,000 to 200,000 it's 39 (36 to 41). At 1 to 2 million it's 56 (53 to 59). The bands are narrow. Two artists with the same monthly listeners almost never sit more than five points apart.

So, 31: top 40% of the artists we track, around 45,000 monthly listeners, about 15,000 followers, and on roughly 5,000 playlists. It's a working artist's number. It is also the number where the cost of producing a record starts being a real conversation instead of a wish, which is the part of this I actually care about.

What the Score Is Tracking

Listeners, far more than anything else. The correlation between artist popularity and log monthly listeners is 0.93. Against log followers it's 0.78, against log playlist reach also 0.78. I'd read that as: the score is a smoothed, recency-weighted version of your monthly listener count, and followers and playlists only show up in it to the extent they produce listeners. That matches what I've seen on records I've mixed: a big playlist add moves the listener count the same week and the score a few weeks later, and a follower spike from a video with no streams behind it moves neither.

Which is why I don't treat it as a separate goal. If you want the number up, you need more people pressing play this month, and the honest routes to that are in how to get more streams on Spotify and how to get on Spotify playlists. The score is the thermometer, not the fever.

How Fast It Moves

I took every artist with a reading between March 1 and April 15, 2026, and another since September 1, 2026, about six months apart, and compared the two. 27,556 artists.

Six-month change in listeners	Artists	Popularity change (median, middle half)	Moved 2 points or less	Gained 5 or more	Lost 5 or more
All artists	27,556	+1 (0 to +3)	66.7%	8.9%	2.9%
Listeners at least doubled	1,175	+8 (+5 to +11)	4.9%	84.7%	0.2%
Listeners between half and double	24,300	+1 (0 to +3)	71.2%	5.8%	0.5%
Listeners at least halved	1,411	-4 (-7 to -2)	26.0%	0.6%	48.2%

Two things I take from that. Doubling your audience is worth about eight points, and a third of the artists who doubled picked up ten or more. And the score is sticky on the way down: halving your audience costs a median four, half of what the same move up earns. Spotify is kinder to a fading artist than to a rising one, which, having been both, I'll take.

The practical read: if your score hasn't moved in six months, neither has your audience, whatever the follower count says. There's a longer version of that argument in why your song gets streams but no fans, and the timeline for actually moving the listener number is in how long it takes to get to 5,000 monthly listeners.

Your Track's Score Goes Down. That's Normal.

Track popularity is a different number from artist popularity, and it has a feature artists hate: it decays. Spotify weights recent streams, so a song that did a million plays in 2021 and does a quiet thousand a week now scores far below a song doing the same thousand a week in its first month.

Here is each artist's top track in our database, bucketed by lifetime streams and by age, scores of 1 and up only (more on the zeros below):

Lifetime streams	Under 1 year	1 to 2 years	2 to 5 years	Over 5 years
Under 10,000	7	3	2	1
10,000 to 100,000	19	11	6	4
100,000 to 1 million	34	26	18	14
1 to 10 million	38	42	33	28
10 to 100 million	18 (103 tracks)	45	45	44

Median track popularity; 90,120 tracks. The under-1-year cell at 10 to 100 million streams is 103 tracks and I wouldn't lean on it.

Read across the 100,000 to 1 million row: 34, 26, 18, 14. Same streams, less than half the score, purely because the plays happened a while ago. When someone squints at an old catalog track and calls it "underperforming," it isn't. It's old. The score measures heat, not history.

The zeros. More than half of the 194,335 top tracks we scored came back from Spotify's API as a flat 0, including tracks under a year old with over a million plays. Spotify returns 0 for a track its lookup can't resolve in the requesting market, and album and single versions of the same song carry separate scores, so a 0 means "no signal on this ID" at least as often as "nobody is playing it." I left them out of the table and I'm telling you so. The age gradient is just as steep with them in.

What I Do With It

The score is one of the first things I look at when an artist comes to me, because it decides how I would work with them: a royalty split, upfront cash, or somewhere in between. Below the mid-20s the record is an investment on both sides; up past 40 there is an audience that will hear it on day one, and the conversation changes.

When someone stuck at 25 asks me how to get to 40, the honest answer is not a release schedule. Your popularity goes up as your songwriting gets better. That is a fact. The better the songs, the more people are interested in your sound, and the more of them come back. The other half is getting better at marketing, finding the ways that actually work for you and building the fan base from there. There is no mix setting for it.

I don't chase it. When someone sends me the screenshot, I translate it to listeners with the table above and then we talk about listeners, because that's the number that pays. At roughly $3,000 to $4,000 per million streams, a popularity of 50 is an artist earning real but not large money from the platform, and a 30 is an artist for whom the record itself is still the investment, not the return.

That's also why the rate calculator asks where you actually are rather than quoting one number at everyone: a record for a pop-31 artist and a record for a pop-55 artist are the same craft at very different stakes, and the price should be calibrated to where you actually are as an artist, not to where the label act down the hall is. The full cost picture is in how much mixing and mastering costs, and the wider view of where artists sit on every metric, not just this one, is in Spotify artist statistics 2026.

How This Was Measured

Artist scores. 220,239 artists with a Spotify popularity between 0 and 100 and a monthly-listener count in the same reading, taking each artist's latest reading from 2,629,191 Chartmetric snapshots collected into the Freshly Baked Studios artist database between February 12, 2025 and October 9, 2026; 167,041 of the latest readings are from June 2026 or later. 53 readings with a stored popularity above 100 were dropped as parse errors. 10,128 artists read 0, median 26 monthly listeners, and they are in the 0 to 9 band. Correlations are Pearson on the score against the natural log of listeners, followers and playlist reach.

The six-month change. For each artist, the latest reading between March 1 and April 15, 2026 and the latest reading on or after September 1, 2026, both with a valid score; 27,556 artists had both. "Doubled" and "halved" are monthly listeners, with a floor of 100 listeners on the first reading so that 12 going to 25 doesn't count as doubling; 670 artists under that floor sit in the first row only.

Track scores. Each artist's top track as recorded in our tracks table, with Spotify lifetime plays and a release date, and a popularity fetched from Spotify's track endpoint between September 21 and October 9, 2026: 194,335 tracks, of which 90,120 scored 1 or higher and appear in the table. Age is release date to October 9, 2026.

What it isn't. The database holds artists who appear on Chartmetric with a public contact route, so it under-represents artists with no footprint at all. Spotify does not publish the formula; everything here is what the published number does against other published numbers. And nothing here says a higher score brings listeners, only that more listeners raise the score.

Where the numbers come from: every figure above was computed by direct SQL against the Freshly Baked Studios artist database on October 9, 2026. Nothing is estimated.