The Most Powerful Music Producers 2021

I thought it would be really interesting to have a look at who the most powerful producers are. The obvious question you’ll be asking is “what does ‘power’ mean when it comes to music producers?”

Right.  I believe that if you look at the world the way it really is–not by thinking about any of the older paradigms–what creates the most power in music is reach.

These days reach is measured in terms of streams.  It’s not measured by Grammys or inductions into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, or even (gasp) positions on the Billboard chart. So…

Since Spotify has the largest market share of the music streaming services, it makes sense to look at total streams on the service. I see Spotify like the music equivalent of Google. No one comes close, so why not use them as a bench-marker? By the way, as of this writing, Spotify has a 36% market share of music streams.

What are the most streamed songs?

On Wikipedia, there is a “dynamic list” called “List of Most-Streamed Songs on Spotify.” That list is frequently updated (hence the title “dynamic list”), but for this article, I used the list that was published and visible online on February 25th 2021. The list is limited to 100 entries.

Interestingly, that list does not include the producer credits. To give you a sense of the producers responsible for the most streamed songs, I simply added the producers’ names to the chart, which you can find below.

That should give you an idea of who the heaviest producers are–at least based on streams. Check it out.