Barbie songs streamed 155 million times on Spotify in first week

Spotify users listened to the 19 songs from the extended edition of The Barbie Album over 155 million times in just one week after the movie premiere. What Was I Made For, by Billie Eilish, accounts for 30.9 million of these streams – the most of all the tracks on the official movie album. Meanwhile, Aqua gained the most new listeners among all the artists featured on the album.

This is according to the educational music platform Music Industry How To, who monitored the Spotify data for all Barbie-related music before and after the movie’s release on July 21^st. Launched on the same day as the much-anticipated movie, the namesake album features 11 brand-new songs and eight previously released tracks.

The songs on The Barbie Album (The Best Weekend Ever Edition) totaled 155,156,740 streams on Spotify over the first week since the movie’s release.

Billie Eilish's What Was I Made For is the most streamed song from the Barbie album. Released a week before the movie, the track had the fastest pace of daily streams of all known Barbie songs before the premiere, with an average of nearly 2.5 million streams per day. A week after the movie entered theatre screens worldwide, the song gained 30,905,271 more streams on Spotify, totaling 51,843,943 so far.

Nicki Minaj's rendition of Aqua's classic Barbie Girl, featuring the original band and Ice Spice, was the most streamed song from The Barbie Album in the opening weekend. Barbie World was listened to 10,308,180 times in just one weekend and 29,174,434 in a week. First released on Spotify on June 23^rd, its total stream count stood at 84,022,453 as at the end of 27 July.

Dua Lipa has the third most streamed Barbie song, with her hit single Dance The Night gaining another 27,291,136 streams in one week. This brings the track's grand total since its release in late May to 144,579,720 streams on Spotify. With 71.4 million monthly listeners currently on the streaming service, Dua Lipa is still the most followed artist featured on The Barbie Album.

The Spotify data monitored by Music Industry How To suggests that Aqua went from 13.5 million listeners at the beginning of the month to 28.4 million in just under four weeks. Over five million of them started listening to Aqua between July 21^st and July 27^th.

This makes the band the music act with the most new listeners on the streaming platform in the first week since the Barbie movie’s global premiere. The original Barbie Girl by Aqua, released in 1997, gained an extra 7.8 million streams on Spotify in just one week since Barbie’s box office debut. Spotify users streamed Barbie Girl 17.3 million more times since the beginning of July.

Ryan Gosling, whose Spotify music includes several soundtracks from La La Land, had 1.4 million monthly listeners before Barbie, the movie, premiered, where he plays Ken. He gained 941,474 new listeners over the opening weekend, and 3,148,334 in a week, beating other established artists like Billie Eilish, Nicki Minaj, Dua Lipa and Lizzo. Ryan Gosling has two tracks on The Barbie Album: I’m Just Ken and Push.

With an active following of 56.4 million before releasing her latest Barbie-themed single, Billie Eilish gained an extra five million monthly listeners since What Was I Made For came out. 2.8 million of them started listening to her on Spotify in the first week of the movie’s premiere. She currently has nearly 61.5 million monthly listeners on the music streaming platform.

A spokesperson for Music Industry How To commented on the findings: “Big-ticket artists have contributed to promoting Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie. In the lead-up to the movie’s box office release, we noticed the hype these artists created by gradually releasing Barbie-themed songs. We had another epic disco track from Dua Lipa in late May, an exciting remix of Aqua’s classic by Nicki Minaj in late June, and then a gorgeous ballad from Billie Eilish in mid-July.

“It was a beautifully orchestrated campaign for the movie to get pop music aerophiles excited about Barbie.” Music Industry How To is an educational platform with resources for singers, songwriters, producers, and other music industry professionals.