Someone has mapped the highest-earning songs in the world by country.
Because the inner financial workings recorded music industry is so opaque, this was a tough assignment. A company called NetCredit found a way to measure the top-earning songs by country. To do this, they pulled up some Spotify stats and sorted things into a series of buckets.
- Only songs that spent at least one week at number one of Spotify’s weekly charts were chosen. This was done country by country.
- Songs were then sorted into genres.
- The number of streams for each song was multiplied by the average payout per stream (between $0.003 and $0.005).
- Voila! The highest-earning song per country.
Here are some topline results:
- The Weeknd’s “Blinding Lights” was the top earner in the most countries. (10)
- The biggest earner overall was “Sunflower” by Post Malone. It was at the top in both Canada and the US.
- When it comes to hip-hop, local artists are the ones that earn the most.
- The UK is still in love with a Killers’ tune that’s almost 20 years old.
Check out the visualization.