The Weeknd Streaming Data Insights
Who is The Weeknd? Why's He Important?
Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, AKA "The Weeknd", is a Canadian singer, songwriter, actor, and record producer. His accolades include four Grammy Awards, 20 Billboard Music Awards, 22 Juno Awards, six American Music Awards, three MTV Video Music Awards, and a Latin Grammy Award. This webpage explores The Weeknd's streaming data. Using Spotify and YouTube information, to illustrate how his music performs, and what insights you can draw about its popularity, culture, and earnings.
About the Data
Domain: Music (Entertainment Industry)
Sub-domain: Streaming metrics (Spotify, YouTube, etc.)
Sub-area: Blinding Lights
The image to the first image on the right displays Spotify top song
statistics, including total streams and daily stream counts,
while the image to the second image presents YouTube video statistics, including total views, daily views,
and publication dates. When structured into rankings and visualizations (such as the one below),
clear patterns emerge. Blinding Lights (18.2% of total streams) and
Starboy (14.8%) dominate the catalog, identifying them as anchor tracks.
"Blinding Lights has become one of the most streamed songs in Spotify history, showing the global impact of The Weeknd's music."
Data Analysis
- His top 10 tracks generate the bulk of streams (over 25B total)
- The dual-platform dominance (YouTube and Spotify) increases his cultural visibility and strengthens revenue streams.
- Tracks like The Hills and Earned It (released nearly a decade ago) still pull in hundreds of thousands of daily streams.
- His lead tracks outperform features by a wide margin (67B vs. 16B streams).
Information Published Based on The Data Above ^
ChartMasters
Top-Earning Artists
"With streaming generating over $20 billion in annual revenue for the music industry, the primary way fans consume music today, it’s time to highlight the biggest earners.
This page ranks the 200 artists whose catalogs generate the highest revenue on platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. The ranking is updated daily with the latest data.
Figures include earnings from all on-demand audio streaming platforms and exclude video streams. They reflect revenue over a 28-day period and represent payouts to rights holders. The share allocated to the artist depends on their contractual agreements.
Example data from ChartMasters
Sherwood News
Blinding Lights Article
"A rough calculation of the amount some of the most-streamed artists have earned on the music streaming platform as of August 2025.
Most major streaming services, including Spotify, do not pay artists a flat rate per stream. Instead, they use a pro-rata payment model. This collects all advertising and subscription revenue over a month, then share 70% (with the other 30% going to Spotify) with artists based on how many streams they accrued during that month.
Not all streams are created equally. The price of a Spotify Premium subscription varies...""
RouteNote
Spotify Earnings
"They said it couldn't be done. They said, maybe, it shouldn't be done. But it's about to happen: we (Spotify's 675 million monthly active users) are about to send The Weeknd's 2019 earworm “Blinding Lights” past the 5 billion stream mark on the platform, making it the first song in history to pass the round-number threshold.
As the second single from “After Hours,” The Weeknd's fourth studio album, the song was a solid hit at the time, spending four weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 — a “respectable stay,” per Stereogum, but by no means absurd. The synth-pop track's staying power since, on the other hand, has been frankly insane.
Example from RouteNote
Main Points From Published Information
- Streaming milestones now function like traditional industry benchmarks (platinum records, Billboard #1s).
- According to sources like RouteNote, artists like The Weeknd are among the highest Spotify earners, which impacts tour planning, marketing budgets, and label investments.)
- RouteNote publishes rankings of the highest-earning Spotify artists, turning raw stream counts into estimated financial value.
- ChartMasters tracks the highest-earning artists from audio streaming, placing The Weeknd consistently among the top global performers based on revenue per stream.
- Sherwood News reports on Blinding Lights surpassing 5 billion Spotify streams, framing the milestone within broader cultural impact.
How Can You Draw Insights From These Points?
Start with a question, such as "How could The Weeknd's Team Use This Information To Better The Weeknd's Business?"
Then, list main points and trends you see in the data. For example:
- Point 1: Capitalize on strong YouTube viewership by negotiating better deals for video-first releases or exclusive premieres.
- Point 2: Leverage TikTok and other content around legacy tracks that are still pulling strong daily numbers to attract different demographics.
- Point 3: Focus on solo singles for higher ROI, since features underperform relative to lead tracks.
From that you will be able to deduce a possible plan. For example, in response to the question, The Weeknds Team could use heat maps as an interactive dashboard where users can explore a world map (or U.S. county/state map) colored by streaming intensity.