Spotify users listened to the 19 songs from the extended edition of The Barbie Album over 372.7 million times in just two weeks after the movie premiere. What Was I Made For, by Billie Eilish, accounts for nearly 78 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. Five tracks from the Barbie album are currently featured on the Billboard Hot 100, including Ryan Gosling’s I’m Just Ken – his first ever song on the reputable chart.
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 21st. 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 372,670,157 streams on Spotify over the first two weeks 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. Two weeks after the movie entered theater screens worldwide, the song gained 77,977,971 more streams on Spotify, totaling 98,916,643 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 68,863,186 in two weeks. First released on Spotify on June 23rd, its total stream count stood at 123,711,205 as at August 4th.
Dua Lipa has the third most streamed Barbie song, with her hit single Dance The Night gaining another 65,994,444 streams in two week. This brings the track’s grand total since its release in late May to 183,283,028 streams on Spotify. With 73.9 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 July to 34.7 million in just over a month. 11.5 million of them started listening to Aqua between July 21st and August 4th. This makes the band the music act with the most new listeners on the streaming platform in the first two weeks since the Barbie movie’s global premiere. The original Barbie Girl by Aqua, released in 1997, gained an extra 16.1 million streams on Spotify in just two weeks since Barbie’s box office debut. Spotify users streamed Barbie Girl 26.5 million more times since the beginning of July and hit 400m total streams on August 5th.
With an active following of 56.4 million before releasing her latest Barbie-themed single, Billie Eilish gained an nearly 10 million more monthly listeners since What Was I Made For came out. 7.6 million of them started listening to her on Spotify in the first two weeks of the movie’s premiere. She currently has 66.3 million monthly listeners on the music streaming platform.
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 7,168,973 in two weeks, beating other established artists like Nicki Minaj, Dua Lipa and Lizzo. Ryan Gosling has two tracks on The Barbie Album: I’m Just Ken and Push. The former became his first ever illboard Hot 100 song, debuting at number 87.
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.”