How's everybody feel about their Spotify Wrapped this year? The streaming giant dropped their annual year in review last year, giving listeners a recap of their listening habits from the past year. (And also inventing some new genres in process...apparently one of my top genres was "Sweater Weather Tavern Country Folk," whatever that means). But anyway, with the annual drop of Spotify Wrapped naturally comes listeners sharing their own stats, and others judging people for how bad (or good) their music taste is. Naturally, Taylor Swift was the most streamed artist of the year - and surprisingly, there weren't any country artists in the top 10, which included pop artists like The Weeknd, Bad Bunny, Drake and Billie Eilish. But honestly, that's not what's interesting to me anyway. What I wait for every year is for artists to post their own year-end stats showing just how much their music was streamed. The reason I find it so interesting is because this data generally isn't made available to the public, so it's one of the rare glimpses behind the scenes that we get into just who people are listening to, and how much they're listening. It's an interesting way to gauge whether an artist really is as big as you thought they were, whether there's somebody that you may have missed, and just get a peek behind the curtain into how many streams these artists really get. I love to see who's being streamed more than I expected, or whose streams are low for an artist of their size. What can I say, I'm a numbers nerd. So as usual, I tried to catch all of the artists who have shared their Spotify Wrapped for Artists stats this year so we could take a look at the numbers and see if anything stands out. Of course, there are some things to keep in mind when we look at these numbers. First, an artist's streams are obviously going to be heavily dependant on whether they released new music that year or not. So a guy like Zach Bryan who drops new music every other week is obviously going to get a boost in streams when he releases new music versus an artist like Morgan Wallen who didn't drop a new album this year (though he did release a couple songs). These are also only stats from a single streaming platform, so we have no idea how much an artist is streamed on other platforms like Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube, or any of the other dozens of platforms out there. (Drop those Amazon Music stats, Garth). And we also obviously have an incomplete data set here, because not all artists share their stats publicly, so we can only work off those who do. But keeping all that in mind, there were still some numbers in the data that we have that I found surprising. Let's start with one of the most-streamed country artists of the year: Lainey Wilson. Obviously Lainey had one of the biggest years of anybody in country music, headlining her Country's Cool Again tour and dropping her album "Whirlwind" back in August. She was also the reigning CMA Entertainer of the Year coming into 2024, so Lainey is no doubt one of the hottest names in country music right now. Just how hot? Well she outstreamed names like George Strait and Eric Church. Lainey finished the year with 613 MILLION streams, while King George had a (still incredible) 608 million despite releasing an album of his own earlier this year. And Church, who hasn't released an album since 2021 but is still a staple of playlists with songs like "Springsteen" and "Drink In My Hand," had 536 million streams. Meanwhile, one of the hottest new acts of the year was the Red Clay Strays, who not only gave us their stats from the year but also shared that their streams had gone up an insane TWO THOUSAND PERCENT over last year. And Zach Top also had quite the increase in streams, more than doubling his listenership from the past year and racking up nearly 200 million streams thanks to viral hits like "I Never Lie" and "Sounds Like The Radio." Parker McCollum's numbers also surprised me - not because of the numbers themselves, but seeing that he managed to rack up nearly half as many streams as George Strait, despite being (to state the obvious) significantly newer and with a much smaller catalog to stream. Now, my guess is that's due in large part to the difference in audiences. Strait naturally has an older crowd that probably doesn't stream music as much, while Parker has a much younger crowd who grew up only listening to music on streaming. But still, I expected the gap between a legend like George Strait and a relative newcomer like Parker to be higher. (I'd say Parker would still prefer to have the King's 60 number one hits though). It was also nice to see that one of my favorite artists, Charles Wesley Godwin, managed to double his streams from 2023 - despite his most recent album coming in September of last year. Nice to know that people have good taste in music and are finally discovering CWG. Obviously those are just a few of the interesting things that I saw in the numbers that were posted this year. I'm sure we could go through and make plenty of assumptions about what the data tells us, but in reality, it's just a cool little peak behind the curtain and a small piece of a much bigger puzzle. Ultimately, these may not tell us much, but if you're like me and enjoy looking through the numbers, we can thank these artists who share their stats for giving us something to talk about. Here are a few more from country artists who shared their Wrapped for Artists: Kaitlin Butts Jake Worthington (This number should be a lot higher, by the way. This guy is incredible). Vincent Mason Randall King 49 Winchester Josh Meloy Muscadine Bloodine It's pretty cool to see these kinds of numbers from an independent artist - and I'm sure being on tour with Post Malone led a lot of people to check them out, which is well-deserved for the boys from Alabama. Craig Morgan Evan Honer Travis Tritt Jesse Daniel (This is another one that should be a lot higher. Need people to wake up to Jesse Daniel, because for my money he's one of the best out there doing it right now). Josiah and the Bonnevilles Drayton Farley Mason Ramsey Shoutout to all 6.5 million of you out there still listening to the Yodel Kid.