Arctic Monkeys’ ‘Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not’ at 20 – the streaming impact revealed
20 years later and it's still proving to be one hell of a hit on Spotify...
By Nick Reilly
As Arctic Monkeys‘ debut album Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not turns 20 years old, the impact of the record on Spotify has been revealed.
Despite reaching the big two decade milestone today, Spotify data exclusively provided to Rolling Stone UK reveals that streams of the album have grown by a massive 307% in the last decade, reaching 284M people at the beginning of 2025. This has been boosted by the fact that nearly 165,000 Gen Z users discovered the album last year.
They are consistently popular too, shown in the fact that they haven’t dropped out of the UK’s top 25 most streamed artists on the platform since 2012. That extends globally too, with fans in the USA and Mexico being the second and third highest streamers of their debut album.
The data reveals that their popularity is often in tandem with their live shows too. The band headlined Sheffield’s Hillsborough Park on 9 June 2023, and that day saw a huge 1.3M streams, allowing it to take the top spot as the most streamed day of all time for the album.
And when broken down track by track, ‘I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor’ ranks as the most popular with 541M streams, followed by ‘When the Sun Goes Down’ with 526M and ‘Mardy Bum’ with 496M.
It’s all reflective, ultimately, of the band’s consistently enduring appeal. You can check out Rolling Stone UK’s definitive track ranking of Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not, here.
The anniversary comes as the band made their comeback this week with brand new single ‘Opening Night’, part of HELP(2), the new album from War Child Records.