By Gary Symons
TLL Editor in Chief
Mattel’s Barbie isn’t just taking over the box office; she’s taking over the Spotify music charts as well.
The film Barbie has become a licensing phenomenon, with some observers estimating the film and doll franchise has lined up some 600 licenses this year.
Among them is the Barbie soundtrack, a critically acclaimed collection featuring stars like Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice and Aqua. Those artists also created the three most streamed songs from the Barbie album. Incredibly, songs from the film have been streamed 52 million times in the opening weekend alone.
The music streamer says Aqua almost doubled their Spotify following in just three weeks, while actor Ryan Gosling, who plays Ken, has become a legit pop star.
The song Barbie World, by Nicki Minaj, Ice Spice and Aqua, topped the Barbie charts, accounting for 10.3 million of these streams, the most of all the tracks on the official movie album. Meanwhile, Aqua gained the most new listeners over the movie’s opening weekend among all the artists featured on the album.
Dua Lipa just missed out on having the most streamed Barbie song, with her hit single Dance The Night gaining another 10,120,370 streams over the opening weekend. This brings the track’s grand total since its release in late May to 127,408,954 streams on Spotify. With nearly 70 million monthly listeners on the streaming service, Dua Lipa is still the most followed artist featured on The Barbie Album.
The figures were crunched and released by the educational music platform Music Industry How To <https://www.musicindustryhowto.com/>, who monitored the Spotify data for all Barbie-related music before and after the movie’s release on July 21. Launched on the same day as the much-anticipated movie, the namesake album features 11 brand-new songs and eight previously released tracks.
“Big-ticket artists have contributed to promoting Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie,” said Music Industry How To in its analysis. “In the lead-up to the movie’s box office release, we noticed the hype these artists created by gradually releasing Barbie-themed songs. We had another epic disco track from Dua Lipa in late May, an exciting remix of Aqua’s classic by Nicki Minaj in late June, and then a gorgeous ballad from Billie Eilish in mid-July. It was a beautifully orchestrated campaign for the movie to get pop music aerophiles excited about Barbie.”
The Spotify data also shows that the Danish band Aqua gained the most popularity this month, which in licensing terms is incredibly ironic.
Aqua is a Danish-Norwegian Europop band which is best known for their 1997 single “Barbie Girl“. The group sold an estimated 33 million albums and singles, making them the most profitable Danish band ever. The irony is that when Barbie Girl was released, Mattel actually filed a lawsuit against the band for trademark infringement. However, the lawsuit was dismissed in 2002 by a judge who ruled, “The parties are advised to chill.”
Now Aqua is officiallly part of Barbie World, and thanks to their new-again hit Barbie Girl, Aqua’s total listeners on Spotify surged from 13.5 million on July 1, to 25.2 million just three weeks later. The original Barbie Girl by Aqua, released in 1997, gained an extra 3.5 million streams on Spotify over three days since the movie premiered. Spotify users streamed Barbie Girl 13 million more times since the beginning of July. That’s despite the fact the film’s version of Barbie Girl is performed by Nicki Minaj.
While Aqua added more listeners over Barbie’s opening weekend than anyone else, Ryan Gosling also did well for someone who’s not actually a musician, although he does have tracks on Spotify from his performance in the musical La La Land.
Gosling had 1.4 million monthly listeners before the premiere of Barbie, but gained close to a million new followers in just three days. Gosling performed two songs in the film, including Push, but it was the song “I’m Just Ken” that has become a major hit on Spotify.