A week after the release of Drake’s new album ‘More Life’, we have some more numbers to play with to gauge its success.
Apple has announced (via The Verge) that the album was streamed 300m times globally on Apple Music in its first week, beating the 250m first-week streams of his last collection ‘Views’ in 2016.
Apple Music appeared to win bragging rights over the album’s first-day streams last week, reporting 89.9m in its first 24 hours compared to 78.5m in its first full day on Spotify. But how do the two services’ totals compare now?
As of this morning, ‘More Life’ has been streamed 697.7m times on Spotify, but that includes 355.6m streams of the track ‘Fake Love’ which was released last October.
Strip that out, and the rest of the new album’s tracks have been streamed 342.2m times on Spotify since its release, plus however many streams of ‘Fake Love’ there were in the last week.
One thing ‘More Life’ hasn’t managed to do yet is put Drake at the top of Spotify’s artist rankings. He’s currently third in that table with 37.2 million monthly listeners, behind The Chainsmokers (40.1 million) and Ed Sheeran (51.1 million).
Even the most popular track off Drake’s album, ‘Passionfruit’, is seeing its 4.1m daily Spotify plays lag behind Sheeran’s ‘Shape of You’ with 6.4m daily plays.
Additional notes of interest: YouTube really isn’t playing a role yet in this campaign. The last video posted to Drake’s official Vevo channel was ‘Hotline Bling’ in October 2015, while Drake’s separate (but verified) personal channel has only seen 39k views for a ‘More Life’ trailer plus 59k views for an interview video about the album.
Finally, back to that piece by The Verge on Apple Music, where it’s fascinating to see Apple starting to bang the drum a bit more for its Beats 1 station, where ‘More Life’ debuted during Drake’s own OVO Sound Radio show.
“What we saw on Drake’s radio show were TV numbers,” Apple’s Jimmy Iovine told The Verge, which added that the show set the (unquantified) record for most listening on Beats 1.
“It’s the biggest radio station in the world. There’s no way you’re going to find another station that has as many concurrent listeners and audience-wise as Beats 1, period,” added his colleague Larry Jackson.
Even if he had provided a figure – he didn’t – understanding what that claim means is tough given the lack of global figures for other stations. But the willingness to talk up Beats 1’s scale may further stoke the fires of speculation about a Beats 2 (and more?) alongside this year’s iOS update.
Tools: platforms to help you reach new audiences
Tools: Kaiber
In the year or so since its launch, AI startup Kaiber has been making waves,…