Who says streaming doesn’t pay?
Tracks from Drake’s More Life playlist are estimated to have already generated over $3 million for the artist, his collaborators and business partners across Spotify and Apple Music – with over 600m streams in total.
MBW has reached that figure using an approximate blended per-stream average which Spotify and Apple are understood to pay across recorded music and publishing/songwriting rights.
The money will have been divided between Drake, his record label (Young Money / Cash Money / Republic Records), publisher (Sony/ATV), and co-writers (and their publishers) – plus anyone else with royalty ‘points’ on his tracks.
According to Spotify data, up until yesterday (March 21), all 22 tracks from More Life had been cumulatively streamed a total of 500,956,242 (500.9m) times.
However, this stat includes over 325m streams for Fake Love – the only song from the set which was pre-released as a ‘single’ in October last year.
Even without Fake Love, More Life managed to draw 175.8m Spotify streams in two-and-a-half days after being released on Saturday (March 19); the equivalent of approximately $880,000 in revenue.
Over on Apple Music, More Life is said to have generated 89.9m streams on day one, bringing its tally across the two services (not counting Fake Love on Spotify) to 265.7m.
Factoring Fake Love back in, that figure rises to 590.8m – and, remember, that doesn’t count More Life’s second full day on Apple Music, where you’d expect it to have pulled in another 50m+ streams.
(Fake Love, by the way, is currently averaging over 2.5m streams a day on Spotify.)
Spotify’s approximate pre-stream payout to the music industry was revealed to be $0.007 across its paid and free tiers in 2013.
However, that figure is said to have shrunk a little since, with insiders suggesting a fair per-stream estimate is now closer to $0.005.
Using Spotify’s 2013 $0.007 per-stream calculation, More Life – including Fake Love – has earned $3.5m in total on the service.
Going off the $0.005 average, that figure moves down to $2.5m.
With 325m plays to date, Fake Love is unsurprisingly the most-played song on Spotify from More Life, generating over $1.6m so far.
Apple’s per-stream payout is said to average out at roughly $0.007, earning More Life a further $629,300 in its opening 24 hours on the platform.
Combine that with Spotify’s to-date figure and you get a total of $3.1m.
(A note of caution: the Spotify data here only reflects ‘chart eligible’ stream tallies, where a user’s daily spin-count of a single track is capped to avoid the chance of anyone gaming the system. So those playing Drake’s tunes from morning to night might be making him even more.)
On the first day of release, Drake set two new 24-hour Spotify records.
He officially surpassed Ed Sheeran’s best ever one-day streams on March 19, clocking up 76,355,041 plays.
On the same day, More Life racked up the best first day streams for a single album, according to Spotify.
The set totalled 61,302,082 streams in the 24 hours, surging past the 56,727,861 streams Sheeran’s Divide (which has 16 tracks) tallied on March 3.
Drake was the biggest artist on Spotify yesterday with 62.5m streams — more than double that of Sheeran.
Based on global monthly listeners, he’s the fifth most listened to artist in the world with 34m.
His Spotify-curated This Is: Drake playlist has over 2.3m listeners.
Earlier this week, Spotify said Drake’s music has been streamed more than 10bn times on its platform. He is the first artist in history to reach the milestone.
Times that number by the $0.005 average stream rate, and you get a payout that’s in excess of $50m on the service to date.
Expect that total to rise considerably after the first week of More Life and beyond.
Check out our track-by-track guide to More Life’s streaming numbers and payout figures (up to March 21) below.
- Free Smoke — 11,206,811 streams: ($0.005 = $56,034) ($0.007 = $78,448)
- No Long Talk — 9,826,556 streams: ($0.005 = $49,133) ($0.007 = $68,786)
- Passionfruit — 15,146,541 streams: ($0.005 = $75,733) ($0.007 = $106,026)
- Jorja Interlude — 8,361,438 streams: ($0.005 = $41,807) ($0.007 = $58,530)
- Get It Together — 9,159,469 streams: ($0.005 = $45,797) ($0.007 = $64,116)
- Madiba Riddim — 8,454,296 streams: ($0.005 = $42,271) ($0.007 = $59,180)
- Blem — 9,813,115 streams: ($0.005 = $49,066) ($0.007 = $68,692)
- 4422 — 8,036,359 streams: ($0.005 = $40,182) ($0.007 = $56,255)
- Gyalchester — 9,433,133 streams: ($0.005 = $47,166) ($0.007 = $66,032)
- Skepta Interlude — 6,818,702 streams: ($0.005 = $34,094) ($0.007 = $47,731)
- Portland — 11,376,257 streams: ($0.005 = $56,881) ($0.007 = $79,634)
- Sacrifices — 8,370,352 streams: ($0.005 = $41,852) ($0.007 = $58,592)
- Nothings Into Somethings — 6,469,610 streams: ($0.005 = $32,348) ($0.007 = $45,287)
- Teenage Fever — 7,942,798 streams: ($0.005 = $39,714) ($0.007 = $55,600)
- KMT — 8,284,382 streams: ($0.005 = $41,422) ($0.007 = $57,991)
- Lose You — 6,432,041 streams: ($0.005 = $32,160) ($0.007 = $45,024)
- Can’t Have Everything — 6,389,744 streams: ($0.005 = $31,949) ($0.007 = $44,728)
- Glow — 6,800,840 streams: ($0.005 = $34,004) ($0.007 = $47,606)
- Since Way Back — 5,706,421 streams: ($0.005 = $28,532) ($0.007 = $39,945)
- Fake Love — 325,134,393 streams: ($0.005 = $1,625,672) ($0.007 = $2,275,941)
- Ice Melts — 5,718,211 streams: ($0.005 = $28,591) ($0.007 = $40,027)
- Do Not Disturb — 6,074,773 streams: ($0.005 = $30,374) ($0.007 = $42,523)
Music Business Worldwide
