Fact Check: Did Carrie Underwood lose 1.5M Spotify listeners after Trump inauguration announcement?
WASHINGTON, DC: Carrie Underwood recently announced that she would be performing on January 20, during President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration ceremony for his presidential term. The announcement, while welcomed by many, was also panned by a section of internet users.
After the announcement was made on January 13, the internet abounded with rumors that the ‘American Idol’ judge had lost around 1.5 million Spotify users who didn’t support the singer’s stance of performing at the political event.
The claim surfaced on the internet starting January 15, when several users shared screenshots of the viral claim on social media platforms including X, Facebook, TikTok and Threads.
Claim: Carrie Underwood lost 1.5M Spotify listeners after announcing she would be performing at Trump's inauguration
After it was reported that Underwood would perform ‘America the Beautiful’ during Trump’s inauguration on January 20, a rumor circulated that the songstress had lost 1.5 million listeners on Spotify just in the span of one day.
Netizens started sharing screenshots of a claim made by several users, including the one made by activist and author Amy Siskind, who wrote, "Carrie Underhood lost over 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify in 1 day," per Snopes.
Siskind’s post on Threads has since then received more than 46.5k likes and 2.1k comments.
Political strategist Cheri Jacobus also wrote, “Carrie Underhood lost over 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify in 1 day.” Since then her post has received 2 million views with 2.6k users commenting on it.
The social media users flocked to the comment section of the social media posts, with someone claiming that they are “not going to watch American idol anymore either,” and another user simply penning “worth it.”
Nevertheless, some flabbergasted users questioned the statistic, asking, “How do you lose monthly listeners in 1 day?”
Fact Check: The claim about Carrie Underwood losing followers is statistically proven false
While the rumor of Carrie Underwood losing 1.5 million monthly users went viral, some of the fans raised questions about the credibility of the claim. After a credible investigation, Songstats -- an organization tracking the statistical data regarding the musicians’ daily and monthly traffick -- declared the rumor to be false.
Songstats, which describes itself as a website providing "real-time music data analytics for artists and labels,” stated that the country singer’s listener count did not drop by 1.5 million users.
In a community note given under the X post of Cheri Jacobus, it was mentioned, “This is false, her monthly listeners only decreased from 11,565,856 on January 14 to 11,562,618 on January 16.”
The website released data to substantiate the claim while revealing that the songstress had 11,607,882 monthly listeners on January 12 - the day before the announcement was made.
On January 16, Underwood received 11,532,540 monthly listeners - roughly a decrease of 75,000 listeners in four days.
Moreover, Snopes reported that Songstats’ data further revealed the 41-year-old ‘Victory in Jesus’ singer witnessed a steep rise in listener count during the holidays.
Trends show that for the last few years, her listener count drops drastically in the month of January. The outlet reported that following the holiday seasons of 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, her monthly-listener numbers fell by around 2.1 million, 3.2 million, 1.7 million and 2.6 million, respectively.
Thus, the 'The Champion’ singer consistently witnesses a fall in the listener count after the holidays are over, and fans no longer listen to holiday-themed music.
