It’s been at least a few days since the last Apple Music vs Spotify stream-count battle, so take a bow Cardi B, who’s the latest artist to be sending records tumbling in the streaming world. Her album ‘Invasion of Privacy’ was released on 6 April, and Apple has put out a big figure for its first-week streams on Apple Music: 100 million.
The company says that this “shattered” the service’s record for the ‘most-streamed album by a female artist in its first week’, more than doubling the previous record-holder Taylor Swift’s total only midway through that week. What’s more ‘Invasion of Privacy is already the fifth most-streamed album on Apple Music ever – in its first week, that is – having overtaken Ed Sheeran’s ‘Divide’ and The Weeknd’s ‘Starboy’.
How does all this compare to Spotify? That’s a tricky question. The company declined to provide its own first-week figure for ‘Invasion of Privacy’ when Music Ally asked, and its public stats aren’t much help, since the album includes her (pre-6-April) hits ‘Bodak Yellow’ (314.3m lifetime streams on Spotify) and ‘Bartier Cardi’ (134.8m).
Meanwhile, YouTube’s Artist Insights tool reveals that in that first week after her new album was released, Cardi B racked up 87.3m total views including official videos and fan-uploaded content. That compares to 48.6m the week before.
No easy conclusions about the merits of the respective services, then, other than simply noting that – sit down for this revelation – Cardi B is quite popular with music-streaming listeners. Which at least may ensure the 2018 end-of-year charts on these services won’t be quite as much of a manly manfest as they were in 2017
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,…