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“Drake’s new album Scorpion is currently being streamed over 10 million times per hour,” chirped Spotify’s official Twitter account on Friday.
There hasn’t been an updated-stats tweet since, which is possibly explained by the announcement on the Twitter feed of Spotify’s greatest rival. “#Scorpion x Apple Music. The most streams in a single day, on any streaming service,” tweeted Apple Music, accompanied by an image emblazoned with ’24 hours. 170 million streams’.
Colombian reggaeton star J Balvin has dislodged Drake from the top of Spotify’s Top Artists rankings. Balvin now has 48.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, ahead of Drake’s 47.9 million.
“Most heard artist in the world on Spotify, position #1. I’m celebrating with all my Latinos and dreamers. Thank you, thank you, thank you,” he wrote on Instagram (well, that’s our translation) with a video post that’s been watched more than 540,000 times in the last 18 hours.
This week’s lead feature looks at podcasting, and its relevance to labels and artists. With an estimated 484 million podcast listeners worldwide at the end of 2017, can the format help bring back some of the context to music that risks being lost in modern consumption habits? Our Tools feature focuses on three startups that […]
Lead: Apple Music is slowly rolling out its analytics tools for artists and Saavn is following suit. YouTube, SoundCloud and Spotify have been offering such tools for years – but as streaming grows, the nature and detail of consumption data delivered back to artists has to keep evolving. Competition here is clearly good as all […]
How to follow up the success of a video where the highlight was your dad-dancing on a flight of stairs? For Drake, the answer is giving away $996,631.90 to strangers.
That’s the clever premise of the video for ‘God’s Plan’ – already a big global hit thanks to the streaming services – which sees Drake wandering the streets of Miami giving money away to all and sundry, complete with a ‘Don’t tell the label’ joke at the start.
The chance to own a portion of the rights to a Drake song? Make it ‘Hotline Bling’ and we’re in!
Make it ‘Jodeci Freestyle’, a 2013 collaboration with J Cole chucked out for free in the promotional run-up to his ‘Nothing Was The Same Album’? Well, that’s a little less appealing. As popular as it is with hardcore Drake-heads, how much money is it really bringing in four years on?
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 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.
Drake’s ‘More Life’ album has been breaking records on Spotify and Apple Music, with the two streaming services engaging in a public battle of the stats yesterday.
This time round, Cupertino emerged on top: Apple announced that ‘More Life’ racked up 89.9m streams on Apple Music in its first 24 hours, while Spotify said that the album totalled 61.3m streams on its first full day (i.e. Sunday) on Spotify.
It’s not a direct time-period comparison, but it’s close enough to fuel some #SpeculativeMaths, based on the most recent public subscriber figures for the two services: 100m listeners on Spotify and 20m subscribers for Apple Music.
Unlike his last album ‘Views’, Drake’s new release ‘More Life’ is available on every streaming service from day one. It’s already reaping the rewards on Spotify.
The album (although it’s officially being referred to as a ‘playlist’) has raced to 78.5m streams on Spotify since its release on Saturday, according to the streaming service’s public metrics, which were updated earlier today.
The obvious comparison is to the 56.7m first-day streams of Ed Sheeran’s latest album ‘Divide’ earlier in March, which shattered the previous record, 29m first-day streams for The Weeknd’s ‘Starboy’.
When is a 22-track album not an album? When it’s a “playlist” by Drake, of course. He released his new alb… sorry, playlist on Saturday, although ‘More Life’ was originally intended to be released by the end of 2016.
The 22 tracks include collaborations with Kanye West, 2 Chainz, Travis Scott, Sampha and Giggs, and as expected, there is no time-limited Apple Music exclusive this time round. ‘More Life’ went live on Spotify and other streaming services at the same time as Apple’s.
“His relationship with the company is still intact,” claimed The Verge. “Calling More Life a ‘playlist’ instead of a mixtape was a collaboration between Drake and Apple Music’s team, and it’s expected their relationship — and Drake dropping exclusive content on the service — will continue.”
Lead: GIFs might seem like a way of flooding the web with the most trivial of content, but they are a hugely important part of building fan communities around artists. While pop acts like Drake, Beyoncé, Little Mix and Lady Gaga are seeing their younger fans churn them out by the bucketload, older musicians like Paul […]
Drake has been named as “the world’s best-selling recording artist of 2016” by the IFPI, making him the fourth recipient of the music industry body’s Global Recording Artist of the Year award.
Drake topped the body’s 2016 list, which was published this afternoon, ahead of David Bowie, Coldplay, Adele, Justin Bieber, Twenty One Pilots, Beyoncé, Rihanna, Prince and The Weeknd.
In fact, Drake’s success in 2016 wasn’t just about selling music: it was about fans streaming his music billions of times on services including Spotify, Apple Music and YouTube.
