A decade after Anti, Rihanna’s catalog is outpacing the most active superstar in pop — and the numbers explain exactly why.
She hasn’t released a studio album since 2016. Her last standalone single was a Smurfs movie soundtrack cut. And yet, Rihanna just surpassed Taylor Swift in monthly Spotify listeners, one of the most closely watched metrics in the music industry.
No rollout. No promo. Just the songs.
What the numbers actually say
Spotify’s monthly listener count tracks unique users who stream an artist within a 28-day window. It measures breadth of listening, not loyalty or record sales. And right now, more people are pressing play on Rihanna than on the artist who just completed the highest-grossing concert tour in history.
Swift’s Eras Tour crossed $1 billion in gross revenue, a record confirmed by Guinness World Records. Her re-recorded albums dominated charts worldwide. By almost every conventional metric, she has defined the past several years of pop music.
Rihanna, meanwhile, has been running a fashion and beauty empire. Fenty Beauty launched in 2017 and reportedly generated over $500 million in revenue in its first year. Forbes estimated her billionaire status in 2021. Music, financially speaking, has not been a necessity for years.
And still, she’s winning the streaming week.
Why Rihanna’s catalog never stopped moving
Industry analysts describe Rihanna’s song catalog as playlist-proof. Tracks like We Found Love, Diamonds, Umbrella and Work have spent years embedded in workout rotations, global party playlists and international radio. They are cross-genre and cross-generational in a way few artists manage to sustain.
Her collaborative reach pulls in additional listeners. Love the Way You Lie with Eminem and This Is What You Came For with Calvin Harris reach audiences who may never search for Rihanna directly but encounter her constantly. We Found Love and Only Girl (In the World) both recently reappeared on the Billboard Global 200 without any promotional push behind them.
Don’t Stop the Music, a single from her 2007 album Good Girl Gone Bad, debuted this week on the Billboard Global Excl. U.S. chart while holding at No. 8 on the Dance Streaming Songs chart in the United States. A nearly 20-year-old song is charting in 2026 with no campaign attached to it.
Swift’s numbers surge around album cycles and release moments. Between them, they normalize. Rihanna’s catalog holds a steady floor because it lives in the background of daily life for millions of people worldwide. That structural difference is what the monthly listener gap reflects.
The studio session that changed the conversation
Late last week, Rihanna posted a time-stamped video to Instagram documenting a day she described as her longest ever. It started with a meeting at Savage X Fenty and ended well past 5 a.m. in a recording studio. She offered no details about the session, named no collaborators and announced nothing. Her caption read ‘Commercial break’ and nothing else.
Fans who have waited nearly a decade for a follow-up to Anti treated the clip as a signal. Streaming numbers responded almost immediately. Her 2023 Super Bowl halftime performance, her first major televised appearance in years, caused streaming spikes exceeding 600% for some tracks according to Spotify data reported by Billboard. Absence, for Rihanna, has consistently functioned as its own promotional strategy.
Beyond the rivalry
Framing this as a competition between Rihanna and Swift misses the more interesting story. Swift built a model around constant fan engagement and album rollouts that function as cultural events. It works at a record-breaking scale.
Rihanna built something structurally different: a catalog embedded so deeply in global listening habits that it accumulates streams without her participation. The Recording Industry Association of America ranks her as the best-selling digital singles artist in American history, with over 100 million certified units. Those songs are still being discovered, still landing on playlists, still reaching people who were children when Good Girl Gone Bad came out.
Monthly listener counts measure who people are playing right now, in this specific 28-day window. Right now, without an album, a single or a tour, that is Rihanna.