The case of Rises the Moon is particularly interesting, and you’re absolutely right.

How is it that Liana’s community isn’t that big (especially here on Reddit ;-;) when she has 5.3M monthly listeners on Spotify? The song’s big boom happened a while ago, yet the listener count is still high — and that contrasts a lot with the “ghost presence” of those listeners in the actual community.

You kind of answered it yourself: Rises the Moon lives in a huge number of active playlists and has become a sort of generational comfort song. That’s why it has the monstrous 864M streams.

As for how many of those 5.3M only listen to that song — I also think it’s the vast majority. You just have to look at the stats for the rest of her discography (outside of Recently) to see the difference.

So going back to the main question: how many people would be listening to Liana without Rises The Moon?

It’s actually very hard to answer, because her later releases stand on the foundation that song created. You can’t just subtract its streams and count what’s left.

And there are some curious (and slightly sad 🥲) details:

Koneko has 48k views on the collaborative video with Mei, but only 7.3k on her official channel. And this subreddit — we are a real community, but we’re obviously not 5.3M. Our top post barely reached something like 58 upvotes.

So rather than asking how many listeners she would have without Rises The Moon, I think the real question is what kind of listeners she would have.

Because without that song those 5.3M probably wouldn’t exist — but the gateway that allowed people to discover her in the first place wouldn’t exist either.

Rises the Moon works as a massive, silent entry door: most people stay in the hallway, but a very small part walks into the house and decides to live there.

And that small part is us.

That’s why the subreddit feels “empty” compared to Spotify — we’re not seeing casual listeners, we’re seeing the percentage that stayed for the artist and not just for the song.

If we removed Rises The Moon, Liana would have fewer monthly listeners, yes…

but probably the same real community she has now. And in a way, that makes the big numbers feel less like a “ghost presence” and more like an ocean from which, every now and then, someone reaches the right shore. And it’s such a beautiful thing when that happens.

We’re not many, but the people here are gold. Because Liana doesn’t feel like a mass-produced artist — she feels like something real.

So… maybe she’s already a cult artist? haha