Which music artist has the biggest Spotify library?
If nothing else, Spotify allows us to quantify music like never before. The world’s number one audio streaming platform gathers and shares all sorts of data about musicians and listeners alike. Most importantly for the music industry, it records how much we listen to what, when, where and in relation to which other artists. But from the perspective of listeners, it also allows us access to the entire back catalogue of almost any major artist at the single tap of a finger.
And some artists have one hell of a back catalogue. Consider the likes of Bob Dylan, who has released 129 albums, including soundtracks, and 104 singles during the course of his career. Or Dolly Parton, who, in addition to her 70-odd albums of original recordings, has released a whopping 222 compilation records worldwide, as well as 204 singles. Although it’s worth noting that the majority of her compilations haven’t made it onto Spotify. Most of Willie Nelson’s 166 albums have, though, along with more than 120 singles.
The younger generation might be championing the cause of trap hip-hop pioneer Gucci Mane, whose extensive use of the mixtape format certainly puts him in the running for the biggest Spotify library. He might have released just 30 albums and 116 singles, but add to that 80 mixtapes with an average running time of over an hour, and suddenly Dylan, Dolly and Willie have a challenge on their hands.
It’s worth noting that the size of a Spotify library, as with any digital body of work, is ultimately measured in bytes and bits, the units of measurement for computational data files. The artist whose cumulative files on Spotify take up the greatest amount of storage bytes will have the largest library. That doesn’t necessarily mean the artist with the most songs or albums since the size of individual files on Spotify varies according to length, volume, and the range and intensity of different sound frequencies they contain.
So, whose library takes up the most space?
In terms of storage space, there’s one artist who leaves rock, country and even trap stars for dust. With over 2,000 individual music files on Spotify, film composer Hans Zimmer has the largest Spotify library of them all. Across more than 110 albums and dozens of singles, most of them soundtracks, Zimmer takes up the greatest amount of cumulative storage of any known artist on the music platform.
Most of his albums are between 90 and 150 minutes long, corresponding to the length of the movies they soundtrack, which explains why they tend to produce larger file sizes than their pop, rock and hip-hop equivalents. John Williams, who has scored 124 different films, could give Zimmer a run for his money in future. But many of Williams’ scores haven’t been uploaded to Spotify officially.
In the meantime, Zimmer can enjoy the luxury of taking up more space on Spotify than anyone else. He’s quite popular on the platform, too. ‘Time’, the main theme for Christopher Nolan’s 2010 thriller Inception, is his most streamed track, with over 363 million listens. What his music takes up in storage space is more than what it gives back in streams then.
