The Weeknd breaks Justin Bieber's record for most monthly Spotify listeners

The Weeknd has broken a new Spotify record, dethroning Justin Bieber as the artist with the most monthly listeners on the platform.

After releasing new album ‘Dawn FM’ earlier this month, which missed out on the Number One spot on the Billboard 200 album chart by just 2,300 copies, Abel Tesfaye has now risen to have 85,667,564 monthly listeners on Spotify, the highest of any artist right now.

The title had previously been held by Bieber for nearly a year, and The Weeknd’s fellow Canadian contemporary still holds the title for being the first artist ever to cross the 90 million monthly listener mark, which he gained just last month.

The Weeknd’s fifth studio album ‘Dawn FM’ was released earlier this month (January 7), serving as the sequel to his 2020 full-length ‘After Hours’. Tesfaye has hinted that the new album might be part of a “trilogy” of albums. Fans have since gone to speculate that ‘Dawn FM’ is its second part, with a third album currently in the pipeline to complete it.

‘Dawn FM’, which The Weeknd had long been teasing before its arrival, features guest appearances from the likes of Tyler, The Creator, Oneohtrix Point Never, and Lil Wayne. It also features narration from actor Jim Carrey, who praised the record as “deep and elegant” prior to its release.

In NME’s four-star review of ‘Dawn FM’, Rhian Daly wrote: “If ‘Dawn FM’ hints at great personal change, musically it doesn’t shake things up quite as much. This isn’t a bad thing – the album is a coherent, cool cruise through dark synth-pop, pulling its references from the ‘80s (Giorgio Moroder, Michael Jackson, Depeche Mode, R.E.M., Talking Heads).

“Tesfaye has said he wants the album to provide a fantasy of escape and its sonics help bolster that feeling that you’ve been whisked off into a different world.”