Twenty one year-old Khalid Donnel Robinson, better known as Khalid, just cemented his place as a worldwide superstar – by becoming the biggest global artist on Spotify.
The RCA-signed singer/songwriter today (April 28) hit 50,043,332 monthly listeners on the streaming platform.
That was enough to overtake Ariana Grande for the No.1 spot on Spotify’s monthly listeners chart – the service’s key indicator of the biggest active artists in the world, which gives a snapshot of the total unique audience of an act in the prior 30 day-period.
Spotify officially had 207 million active users worldwide at the close of last year. Today’s news therefore suggests that somewhere close to a quarter of Spotify’s total global audience has listened to Khalid at some point in the past month.
Grande, at No.2, has 50,026,186 monthly Spotify listeners, according to Spotify’s public-facing data today. Latin superstar J.Balvin is at No.3 with 48,274,653 monthly listeners, with Post Malone at No.4 (47,620,291) and Billie Eilish at No.5 (45,120,246).
Eilish’s Bad Guy is No.1 on Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart today, ahead of Taylor Swift’s big comeback single ME! (feat Brendon Urie).
Khalid’s highest entry on the Global Spotify chart is Talk, currently at No.11. The track now has more than 186 million streams on the platform.
Earlier this month, Khalid released his second studio LP, Free Spirit, featuring tracks such as Talk and My Bad – the latter has over 75 million streams on Spotify.
Khalid signed to RCA as a 17-year-old, inking a deal with the Sony label’s A&R exec, Tunji Balogun.
Balogun has since been promoted to EVP of the label, while also running his JV with RCA, I Keep Cool.Music Business Worldwide
