Fantasy Festival League: Who is the most streamed artist in December headlining a UK music festival in 2025?

• As the UK festival season 2025 continues to shape up, expect a lot more names to be revealed in the new year.
• But who from the pantheon of huge names already announced are the most lucrative on streaming services; namely Spotify?
• Using a little arithmetic and Spotify streams, we set out to find out - and will continue to until festival season is over.

Call us curious, intrepid or perhaps a little bored at this time of year, but during our morning meeting, the question was asked - who is the most lucrative UK festival headliner in 2025?

Although it might be somewhat hard to estimate, owing to the number to 360 deals that musicians sign up for, owing to the “little" money that is made through streaming services, thankfully we found a metric almost everyone can agree on - Spotify.

In keeping also with the great British sporting tradition too, we decided that rather than a “one off” piece, why not keep a league table throughout 2025 - not only to remind ourselves of the latest wave of artist announcements still to come (Emily Eavis, we’re looking at you) but also the ever fluctuating world of digital streaming.

But how could we accomplish such a task before Christmas 2024?

The science part

Rather than dive into the likes of Celebrity Net Worth, we’ve decided to instead visit the real-time statistics that are provided by Kworb to determine the number of streams the artists have attained in total so far.

We’ve then based the royalties on the notion that Spotify would pay a higher-profile artist (around the £0.000025 mark, which you’ll already have heard many complain about by now) and accounting for the 20% a label may take from the artists, we based the standing on that equation.

Almost like in the Premier League also, we’ve cut off the league table to the top 10 artists, in anticipation that when more musicians are announced in future line-up reveals, some may enter our league, others may drop out.

Fantasy Festival League: current league table (as of December 2024)

It goes without saying, despite the rise of a number of modern day pop stars, the older crowd are still the most lucrative when it comes to festival appearances - according to Spotify numbers and our little mathematical equation.

Head and shoulders above the rest is Travis Scott, who as of writing has amassed 51,805,558,379 streams on Spotify, which is an estimated £181.3 million made through Spotify royalties. Then we see our first number of recent pop superstars enter the league table with Olivia Rodrigo estimated to have made £70.9 million through streams on the platform.

TRNSMT 2025 headliner 50 Cent then comes third, with an estimated £52.7 million in streaming revenue from Spotify, followed by Justin Timberlake (£47.6 million) and in fifth place Hozier (£43.4 million).

Our Fantasy Festival League will continue across the months leading into the UK festival season; who do you think could move around in our league table and who do you think might make it into the top 20 that is rumoured to be performing this year? Let us know by leaving a comment below.