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The 50 Most Popular Rock Bands in The World
According to Spotify’s monthly listeners.
Who are the most popular rock bands in the world right now? In the past, we’ve used sales to determine the popularity of a musician. However, the way we consume music has dramatically changed in this streaming era,
Record sales no longer paint the picture of how popular a band is.
People don’t buy music anymore — they stream music from platforms like Spotify and Apple Music.
Spotify is the world’s most popular music streaming platform, with around 700 active Monthly listeners and around 250 million premium subscribers. That’s a pretty strong sample size to use for determining the most popular music artists in the world.
So that’s what I did!
In this article, I list the 50 most popular rock bands in the world currently, according to ‘monthly listeners’ on Spotify.
Defining Rock Music
Compiling this list isn’t as simple as listing the top fifty artists regardless of genre.
Determining how we define rock music is contentious.
A few of the bands on this list are soft/pop rock, which many people (like me) wouldn’t consider rock music; for example, Imagine Dragons and…

