Fact Check: Did Carrie Underwood Really Lose Millions of Spotify Listeners?

Fact Check: Did Carrie Underwood Really Lose Millions of Spotify Listeners?

There’s no need to speculate: in 2025 we can get realtime data on how Carrie Underwood’s decision to sing at President Donald Trump’s inauguration affected her popularity.

Three things are possible:

      Streams spiked massively with the announcement.

 

      Streams plummeted faster than the Hawk Tuah girl’s crypto currency.

 

    People really don’t care that much.

Social media response to Underwood’s explanation for why she’s performing focused heavy on No. 1 and No. 2. Let’s see what the data says.

Carrie Underwood Quote Inauguration
Getty Images

Give credit to self-described political strategist Cheri Jacobus for inspiring this deep-dive. She didn’t shine light on the truth about Underwood’s streams. Instead, she sent the tweet that inspired a community correction, and that group of people brought receipts.

Nearly two million people saw her message that “Carrie Underhood (sic) lost over 1.5 million monthly listeners on Spotify in 1 day.”

Twitter/CheriJacobus
Twitter/CheriJacobus

A website called Songstats tracks these kinds of things. In a few clicks one can find Underwood’s profile and navigate to her Spotify audience over the last month, three months, six months, etc …

It looks like she did lose monthly listeners. On Jan. 13, Underwood had 11,587,076 monthly listeners, and the next day she was down to 11,565,865. It’s a difference of 21,211.

So, it wasn’t that bad, but she still took a hit because of her controversial inauguration performance right? Maybe not.

Underwood’s monthly listeners have been falling since Dec. 26, when she peaked at 11,831,642. That number is an all-time high for her (since 2020) and reflects a trend of spiking at Christmas time and falling shortly after.

Here is a screenshot of her last 12 months:

Carrie Underwood Spotify Numbers
Songstats.com

For comparison, we looked at stats for other artists. Morgan Wallen’s numbers are up after reaching a seven-month low at Christmas. Jelly Roll is trending down after a holiday season spike. During that same Monday to Tuesday span, he lost 80,881 monthly listeners without saying a thing on social media.

Ebbs and flows are totally normal. High profile appearances almost always lead to spikes, so it will be interesting to see what Jan. 20 brings for Underwood. It’s hard to believe the muting of those angry with her will overcome those who are brought to her catalog once again after she sings “America the Beautiful.”