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| - An online rumor circulating in January 2025 claimed country music star Carrie Underwood had lost more than 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify. The rumor's promoters linked the alleged drop in listeners to news from Jan. 13, reporting Underwood would sing "America the Beautiful" at U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's Jan. 20 inauguration in Washington, D.C.
Beginning on Jan. 15, users on Facebook, Threads, TikTok and X mostly shared the same sentence in spreading the rumor: "Carrie Underhood lost over 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify in 1 day."
One of the most popular posts displaying the rumor on X (below) received around 2 million views.
Snopes also received reader emails asking whether the rumor was true. For example, one reader asked, "Did Carrie Underwood lose 1.5 million subscribers on Spotify because she's performing at Trump's 2nd inauguration?"
However, this rumor was false. According to the Songstats service on songstats.com — a website describing itself as providing "real-time music data analytics for artists and labels" — Underwood's Spotify numbers did not drop by more than 1.5 million monthly listeners in the days prior to Jan. 15. (A community note under the above X post linked to the Songstats service.)
On Jan. 12 — the day before the general public received word of Underwood's scheduled inauguration performance — Songstats' data displayed 11,607,882 monthly listeners for the singer. A check of Spotify.com on Jan. 16 displayed 11,532,540 monthly listeners — a four-day decrease of roughly 75,000 listeners.
A a deeper study of the Songstats data for Underwood showed her monthly-listener numbers rose around past Christmas and holiday seasons and dropped dramatically in the month of January. Following the holiday seasons of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, Underwood's monthly-listener numbers fell by around 2.1 million, 3.2 million, 1.7 million and 2.6 million, respectively. In other words, her numbers typically show a dramatic fall every January, once listeners are finished listening to holiday-themed music.
Other popular singers with libraries of holiday-themed music also see similar drops in Spotify listeners in January, including singer-songwriter Kelly Clarkson. Clarkson's numbers rise and fall by tens of millions of monthly listeners ever year between November and January.
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