How Many Monthly Listeners On Spotify Is Good? (And How To Grow)

How many monthly listeners on Spotify is good? 

Obviously, this is quite a large range in what you can earn based on your monthly listeners. 

Keep reading as I'll break down with the rest of this article why this range is so large...

And what you can do to grow your monthly listeners and ensure that you fall on the higher end of this earning spectrum. 

How Many monthly listeners on spotify is good?

What makes monthly listeners good or bad really depends on you, your goals, and how engaged your fans are. 

If you have anywhere from 10,000 to 50,000 monthly listeners, then you're in a really good place, if those listeners are actually mostly engaged fans, as you could earn anywhere from $400 to  $1,500 or more.

This range exists because "monthly listener" is a very vague metric (more on this below). 

So first you have to decide how much you actually want to earn from Spotify streams, and what is considered "good" to you. 

From there, you have to look how engaged your fans are, and determine if you really need to grow your monthly listeners, or simply get your current listeners to listen more...

Which is much easier than acquiring new listeners.

For example, the monthly listeners for The Weeknd stream his songs an average of 7 times each per month. 

If each of your monthly listeners streamed your music 7 times each month, how many monthly listeners would you need to hit your goals?  

You can check out my free calculator below to determine what is a good monthly listener goal for you.

What Counts As A monthly Listener On Spotify? 

According to Spotify a "monthly listeners" are...

"Unique listeners who play your music during a 28-day period" - Spotify

This means if one unique person listens to your music in a 28-day period, they count as a monthly listener. If that one unique listener listens to 10 of your songs, they gave you 10 streams, but they still only count as one monthly listener. 

In another article on this topic, Routenote says that you need 256,000 monthly listeners just to earn minimum wage ($1,260 a month), but this doesn't take into account that a single monthly listener could account for dozen of streams. 

How many times a month do you listen to your favorite artists? 

I'm probably a little weird in that I can often listen to a single artist, or even song, multiple times. 

In fact, in just the last 7 days, I listened to Overcrest 93 times. 

What, I was doing research for this blog and Overcrest makes fantastic Synthwave/Chillwave music, perfect for research!

And yet, I still count as just 1 monthly listener for him. 

do monthly listeners matter on spotify?

While monthly listeners don't really matter when it comes to determining streaming income, they are a good indicator of how many unique listeners an artist has.

I'd say streams are more important, because those translate directly to royalties, but it can still be a good to see what your monthly listeners are to get an idea of how large your audience is. 

How many monthly Spotify listeners To Make a Living? 

200,000-250,000. If each of your monthly listeners accounts for 4 streams each, then you would need 250,000 monthly listeners to make a living at $4,000 a month. If each monthly listeners only accounts for 2 streams, however, then you would need to double that number to 500,000 monthly listeners.

Again, these numbers fluctuate based on what your average number of streams is per monthly listener. 

If each of your monthly listeners averages 7 streams a month, like The Weeknd's monthly listeners, then you'd only need 142,860 monthly listeners to earn $4,000 a month. 

How many monthly listeners on spotify is average?

According to Spotify, nearly 80% (78.4%) of artists on Spotify today have less than 50 monthly listeners. 

How many Monthly listeners on spotify makes an artist famous? 

There is no set number of monthly listeners that makes someone famous, as fame is completely relative. What might be considered "famous" in one genre of music, wouldn't be considered famous in a different one. Some artists with less than 100k monthly plays on Spotify perform in front of 30k live people who are absolutely in love with their music.

Regardless, fame in general is not a great indicator of whether an artist is successful or not, and really shouldn't be pursued for its own sake. 

How many spotify artists have over a million monthly listeners?

Around 9,000 Spotify artists have over a million monthly listeners, according to 2021 data from Spotify.

How to grow your monthly listeners

The best way to grow your monthly Spotify listeners is to consistently release new great music, collaborate with other artists, and learn and apply music marketing strategies.

Obviously, this is a lot to unpack, which is why I've create a complete step-by-step article on how to grow your monthly listeners...

Which you can read here: How To Get More Monthly Listeners On Spotify In 2022 (9 Simple Tips)

But here are some big picture steps you can take...

Be Consistent & Prolific

If you want people to keep coming back to listen to your music on Spotify, then you need to have new music for people to listen to. 

Therefore, you want to be consistently learning, improving your art, and releasing new music (every 4-8 weeks). 

I know this sounds like a lot, but if you can get past "perfectionism", and just commit to releasing new music (provided it's not awful) you will start to build some momentum

Collaborate With Other Artists

By collaborating with other artists who are about the same size as you, you can immediately double your audience, and some of their fans might become fans of yours. 

This is one of the fastest ways to grow, so I highly recommend you build this into your strategy

Learn Marketing

Obviously, this is a big step, which is why a lot of the content on this site is dedicated to teaching it. 

But it's not enough in our distracted and oversaturated world to simply put out good music. You need to apply marketing strategies to ATTRACT listeners and fans. 

There is social media marketing, which you've likely heard something about, but the most important marketing tool is actually email. 

I know, this probably sounds crazy, but your listeners are FAR more likely to become superfans and actually buy stuff from you if you can get them on your email list. 

Also, if they are on your email list, then EVERY one of your email list subscribers will see the emails you send them. Can you imagine 100% reach to your fans on social media? That's unheard of. 

In fact, only about 10% of your followers on social media will see what you post, or, if it's really good, these platforms might show it to more of your fans. 

But with email marketing, everyone gets your email. They might not open every email, but they'll at least see it in their inbox, keeping you top of mind. 

If you want to learn more about email marketing, what it is, why it's important, and how to apply it, then check out my article here.

How to trigger the Spotify algorithm

Another great strategy for growing your streams and monthly listeners on Spotify is to actually trigger the algorithm so that it promotes your music for you. 

You can trigger the algorithm by getting your music on to a bunch of Spotify playlists, and my free guide below walks you through how to do this for free. 

Free Spotify Playlist Placement Guide: How to Hack The Algorithm