Maria Callas acknowledges the applause at the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam, 11 July 1959. Photo by Joop van Bilsen, Anefo, Nationaal Archief (CC0).
A chart is doing the rounds on social media these days, the kind that makes opera-goers smile and opera producers think. It is signed Opera’s Critical Point and ranks the ten sopranos with the most monthly listeners on Spotify, that is, the people who played at least one of their tracks in the last twenty-eight days. This morning, 10 October 2026, we reopened the ten artist pages one by one: the figures had moved by less than one per cent. First Maria Callas with 768,400 listeners, then Kiri Te Kanawa with 533,800, Montserrat Caballé with 525,100, Renée Fleming with 486,900, Joan Sutherland with 369,500, Anna Netrebko with 285,200, Mirella Freni with 163,700, Pretty Yende with 137,300, Nadine Sierra with 127,700, Kathleen Battle with 91,600.
The first thing that strikes you is the register of births and deaths. Callas died in Paris in September 1977, Sutherland in 2010, Caballé in 2018, Freni in 2020. Kiri Te Kanawa stopped singing in public in 2017. The first voice you can still find on an opera house’s season, Anna Netrebko, is in sixth place. The stage and streaming keep two different charts: in the second, what counts is the records already made, not the performances on the calendar.
Then there is the scale. Added together, and counting twice anyone who listens to more than one of them, the ten names reach 3.49 million listeners. Luciano Pavarotti alone has 3.6 million. Andrea Bocelli 9.1. Bruno Mars, number one on the whole platform, had 132.2 million in mid-September. The most-listened-to soprano voice in the world gathers in a month less than one hundredth of a pop star’s audience.
The most entertaining part, though, lies one floor down, in the tracks. For each artist Spotify shows the ten most-played pieces, and there the chart changes face. Maria Callas’s most-played track is the Habanera from Carmen, «L’amour est un oiseau rebelle», from the complete recording she made in Paris with Georges Prêtre in 1964. Carmen is a mezzo-soprano role, and Callas never sang it in a theatre. On the same list is «Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix», Dalila’s aria: another mezzo role, another part never taken to the stage. The most-listened-to soprano on the planet owes her top track to a cigarette girl from Seville she never played in front of an audience.
Montserrat Caballé is third thanks to the singer of Queen. Six of her ten most-played tracks are sung with Freddie Mercury: «Barcelona» in the 1987 version and in the re-orchestrated one, «How Can I Go On», «Guide Me Home», «La Japonaise», «Ensueño». The fourth is a duet with Gotthard, a Swiss hard rock band. Mercury on his own has 2,478,097 monthly listeners, almost five times as many as she does. «Barcelona» became the song of the 1992 Olympic Games, and Mercury did not live to see them: he had died in November 1991.
The real tenor, meanwhile, lives on the pages of two others. Joan Sutherland’s first track is the Brindisi from La traviata with Pavarotti, and Pavarotti returns in four of her ten. Mirella Freni finds him in five, and in six of her ten tracks Herbert von Karajan is on the podium. It is no whim of the algorithm: Freni and Pavarotti were born in Modena in the same year, 1935, and according to the story they told all their lives they had shared the same wet nurse.
And then there is the oddest case of all. The Flower Duet from Léo Delibes’s Lakmé, 1883, a page for soprano and mezzo that a British Airways commercial of the late 1980s carried into the ears of people who had never seen an opera, appears among the ten most-played tracks of five singers out of ten. It is first for Kiri Te Kanawa, who sings it with Katherine Jenkins, the Welsh crossover voice. It is first for Nadine Sierra and for Pretty Yende, who recorded it together and so share the same track across two charts. It is third for Netrebko, with Elīna Garanča, and fourth for Sutherland. Netrebko’s first track, instead, is the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann, again with Garanča: another duet for two female voices, another French opera of the late nineteenth century. On Spotify, sopranos win in pairs, and without a tenor.
The others found their audience outside the theatre. Among Renée Fleming’s most-played tracks are a folk song recorded with Dolly Parton and «You’ll Never Know», from the soundtrack of Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water. Kathleen Battle appears with «Lovers», Shigeru Umebayashi’s song for Zhang Yimou’s House of Flying Daggers. Pretty Yende has in second place «Amazing Grace», sung with Il Volo, live at the Valley of the Temples in Agrigento.
Some striking names are left out. Renata Tebaldi, the rival of the 1950s, has 72,000 monthly listeners: on Spotify the war between the two camps ended ten to one. Angela Gheorghiu has 44,900. Sarah Brightman has 2.2 million and would be first with almost three times Callas’s figure, but the chart left her out because hers is a crossover voice: her most famous Opera remains the one with the Phantom.
A warning, before taking these numbers as gospel. Spotify counts the listeners of a profile, and the classical catalogue is scattered across many profiles. There is a page headed «Maria Callas with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Tullio Serafin», with zero listeners. Kiri Te Kanawa has a second one, «Dame Kiri Te Kanawa», with 611. The chart measures each singer’s main page, and so it also measures how well the record companies have put their archives in order.
Callas spent a whole career without singing Carmen in a theatre. Today, for anyone who looks her up on Spotify, Carmen is the first thing she sings.