Okay, so she might not have dropped a secret album under the pseudonym of Zandhr as some fans hoped, but Ariana Grande has set a new milestone on Spotify this week with her latest single.
“thank u, next has surpassed 100 MILLION streams on spotify in only 11 days. it is the fastest song in HISTORY to reach this milestone!” wrote Grande on Instagram yesterday – a post that at the time of writing already has more than 2m likes. The track’s momentum isn’t trailing off either: this morning ‘thank u, next’ sat atop Spotify’s Global Top 50 chart with a daily play count of 8.1m streams.
One interesting (well, we think) point about this: according to the streaming service’s US Top 50 chart, nearly 3.2m of those plays are from American Spotify users – meaning around 39.5% of its activity is from Grande’s homeland. She’s currently the 15th most popular artist on Spotify with 37.8 million monthly listeners.
But if you’re still tempted to wander down that Zandhr internet-conspiracy rabbit-hole, here’s a thing: Zandhr’s profile remains on Spotify – Ariana-style upside-down font included – but it also has a ‘verified’ blue tick… According to their Twitter account (14 followers!) Zandhr’s album ‘Freedom’ “will be releasing this Friday and this will feature step on up, baby loves, boyfriend material, better days & many other songs that you guys wanted”. So probably not Ariana after all.
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