2016 has been a stellar year for Drake, and the milestones keep coming for his ‘Views’ album and its singles.
The album has just passed 3bn Spotify streams – it’s on 3,043,873,801 at the time of writing – since its release on the streaming service on 13 May.
Views’ big hits are playing a big role in that success, as you’d expect. ‘One Dance’ alone has 924.5m Spotify streams so far, with ‘Hotline Bling’ (556m), ‘Too Good’ (426.6m) and ‘Controlla (255.9m) also proving popular.
Views originally made its debut as an Apple Music and iTunes exclusive on 28 April, selling more than 1m copies on the latter store in its first week. The album reached 1bn streams on Apple Music by late September.
Apple also paid for the video to ‘Hotline Bling’ with its iconic dad-dancing. That video has also just reached a milestone of its own: more than 1bn views on YouTube – 1,003,920,752 views at the time of writing.
Drake has forged a close relationship with Apple, appearing on-stage at its Apple Music launch in June 2015, and hosting his own OVO Sound Radio show on its Beats 1 radio station.
His popularity spans streaming services though: Drake is currently Spotify’s top-ranked artist with 36.5 million monthly listeners. He also recently reached another milestone on that service: seven million fans following his profile, while Spotify says he’s the most-streamed artist on its platform with more than 8.4bn lifetime plays.
Drake’s streaming popularity has also fuelled chart success, with ‘One Dance’ sticking like a limpet to the US and UK singles charts for several months earlier this year, with streams making the track so hard to unseat from top spot.
Drake isn’t done with 2016 yet, however. He recently announced plans for a new collection of songs called ‘More Life’ to be released in December.
He described it as a “playlist” rather than an album, with three tracks – ‘Sneakin’, ‘Fake Love’ and ‘Two Birds, One Stone’ already having been released on streaming services. Apple Music play-counts are not public, but on Spotify those three tracks have already been played nearly 55m times.
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