Yo-Yo Ma. Photo by Brantley Gutierrez, Opus 3 Artists press photo.
On Friday 16 October 2026 we opened the Spotify pages of forty cellists, living and dead, concert soloists and YouTube phenomena, and read each one’s monthly listeners: the people who played at least one of their tracks in the last twenty-eight days. First comes Yo-Yo Ma, with 3.8 million. Second, Apocalyptica, a Finnish metal band born out of four cellists, with 3.7 million. Then Gautier Capuçon with 2 million, Sheku Kanneh-Mason with 1.8, Hauser with 1.3, Peter Gregson with 955,900, 2Cellos with 875,800, Mischa Maisky with 768,400, Mstislav Rostropovich with 760,500 and Jian Wang with 549,200.
A week ago, among the sopranos, the dead were in charge. Here it is the other way round. Only one of the top ten is no longer alive, Rostropovich, who died in Moscow in 2007, and he is ninth. Three places out of ten go to crossover acts: Apocalyptica, 2Cellos and Hauser, who is half of 2Cellos. On Spotify the cello is a young instrument, and it often lives far from the concert hall.
Yo-Yo Ma alone has more listeners than Luciano Pavarotti, who had 3.6 million on the same day. Andrea Bocelli has 9. Bruno Mars, number one on the whole platform, 129.6. And there is a coincidence we did not go looking for: Mischa Maisky, eighth, has 768,400 listeners, exactly the figure Maria Callas had last Saturday as the top soprano. The eighth cellist weighs as much as the first voice.
Yo-Yo Ma’s most-played track is the Prelude from Bach’s First Suite, two and a half minutes of solo cello. Next come Saint-Saëns’s Swan and Brahms’s Lullaby with Kathryn Stott at the piano, and in sixth place “Gabriel’s Oboe”, the theme Ennio Morricone wrote for Roland Joffé’s The Mission in 1986, which Ma recorded in 2004 with the Roma Sinfonietta conducted by Morricone himself.
Apocalyptica were formed in Helsinki in 1993 by students of the Sibelius Academy, and their first album, in 1996, was called Plays Metallica by Four Cellos. Today their five most-played tracks all feature a guest singer. At the top is “I Don’t Care”, from 2007, with Adam Gontier of Three Days Grace. The first track credited to the band alone comes sixth, and it is Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”: the cover where it all began. The second most-streamed cellist in the world is a band playing orchestra to a rock voice.
Capuçon, born in Chambéry in 1981, owes third place to Satie: the First Gymnopédie, orchestrated, then Ludovico Einaudi’s “Una mattina”, the one from The Intouchables, and in fifth place Mia and Sebastian’s theme from La La Land. Sheku Kanneh-Mason, who at nineteen played at the wedding of Harry and Meghan in May 2018, has as his top track the Swan with his sisters Isata and Jeneba. In tenth place there is a lullaby by Eric Whitacre recorded with all his siblings: seven Kanneh-Masons on the same track.
Hauser and Luka Šulić founded 2Cellos in 2011, the year their version of “Smooth Criminal” went round YouTube. Today the duo draws 875,800 listeners, Hauser on his own 1.3 million, Šulić 265,400. The top track of 2Cellos is “Now We Are Free”, from Gladiator by Hans Zimmer, Lisa Gerrard and Klaus Badelt, followed by “Despacito” and AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck”. Hauser, on his own, stays high with Bach’s Air on the G String, “Nessun dorma” and Lucio Dalla’s “Caruso”. Pavarotti’s repertoire, without Pavarotti.
The best story sits in ninth place. The most-played track by Rostropovich, the man who on 11 November 1989 played Bach in front of the freshly opened Berlin Wall, is the Scene from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. There he does not play the cello: he conducts the Berlin Philharmonic, in a 1978 recording for Deutsche Grammophon. Four of his ten tracks come from those ballet suites, baton in hand. One step above him, by fewer than eight thousand listeners, stands Maisky, born in Riga in 1948, who according to his official biography is the only cellist to have studied with both Rostropovich and Gregor Piatigorsky. The pupil has overtaken the master.
Jian Wang, tenth, owes his place to a panda. Five of his ten tracks come from the soundtrack of Kung Fu Panda 3, written by Hans Zimmer in 2016, where the solo cello is his, next to Lang Lang’s piano. Eleventh, fewer than three thousand listeners behind, is Camille Thomas, the first female cellist to sign an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon: six of her ten tracks are by Philip Glass, to whom she devoted the album released on 18 September.
Some heavy names are left out. Jacqueline du Pré is thirteenth with 435,600 listeners, and her ten tracks contain the whole Elgar Concerto, all four movements, in the August 1965 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and John Barbirolli. On Monday it will be thirty-nine years since her death, on 19 October 1987; multiple sclerosis had taken her off the stage in 1973. Pau Casals, the first to record all of Bach’s Suites, between 1936 and 1939, has 101,600. Piatigorsky, Maisky’s teacher, a mere 3,500. Hildur Guðnadóttir, the Icelandic cellist who won the Oscar for the score of Joker, has 343,000, and her top track is “Bathroom Dance”. The Italians: Giovanni Sollima 38,000, Mario Brunello 10,400, Enrico Dindo 3,100.
A warning before taking these numbers as gospel. Spotify rounds, and it counts the listeners of a profile, not of a person. Casals is filed under his Catalan name, Pau. Jacqueline du Pré has a second page, shared with Daniel Barenboim and the Israel Philharmonic, with 4,500. A group counts as one, while eight of Šulić’s ten tracks are 2Cellos recordings also credited to him. We counted each artist’s main page.
Rostropovich spent his life getting Shostakovich, Prokofiev and Britten to write for the cello. Today his most-played track is one he recorded without touching the instrument.