Dr Dre’s new album ‘Compton: A Soundtrack’ was released as an Apple Music exclusive earlier this month, so how is it performing?
Apple released some stats this weekend, telling the New York Times that the album notched up 25m streams in its first week, as well as 500k sales through the iTunes Store. “We’re beginning to show what we can do in terms of communicating music to a worldwide audience and helping artists at the same time,” said Apple’s Jimmy Iovine.
The NYT compares the album’s first-week performance to the last releases from Drake (48m first-week streams) and Kendrick Lamar (39m) that were both available through rivals like Spotify.
That said, place your own bet on the extent to which those greater totals were down to widespread availability versus greater interest from fans in albums from younger artists. ‘Compton’ is a two-week exclusive to Apple, so we’ll be interested to see how it performs once released elsewhere.
Beats 1’s Zane Lowe has been talking to Billboard, meanwhile, in an interview providing a few more details on how Apple Music’s live radio station is evolving. Lowe talked about how tweaks have been made to the general flow.
“After the first week, it was really exciting to hear how it all fit together, but also at times it was jarring. For instance, we would come out of big shows by Q-Tip or Disclosure, and the first song was really slow — you’re immediately losing the impact you’ve gained from the previous song,” he said.
“So we made some changes. We also noticed in the first week people listened for really long amounts of time, which meant songs got tired quickly, so we revised our rotations. And we’re working on a replay service and we want to get full on-demand ready.”
Apple debuted replays of Beats 1 shows within its Connect section – and subsequently in the main Apple Music service – earlier this month.
Lowe also lays out his intentions for Beats 1: “We’re a broadcasting platform on a music service, so when people hear something they like, the idea is they’ll go deep: go into the music service, learn more, listen to the albums. That’s really important.”
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