Drake’s 25-track Scorpion album was streamed more than 170m times worldwide on Apple Music yesterday (June 29), Apple has confirmed.
The previous biggest global debut on Apple Music was another Drake project – mixtape More Life, released in March last year – which was streamed 89.9m times worldwide in its opening 24 hours on the platform.
Scorpion’s 170m+ day-one number is not far off double this 89.9m figure.
Scorpion was streamed on Spotify approximately 132m times yesterday – nearly 40m behind the 170m stat confirmed by Apple.
(Spotify is yet to officially confirm its worldwide day-one number, and it may end up a little higher than 132m. This number was calculated by MBW using chart-eligible stream counts reported by SpotifyCharts.com earlier today. Yet some streams from users are not counted here, as Spotify puts a cap on the number of plays each individual user can contribute to the chart within a 24 hour period.)
The news of Apple’s huge 170m stream count mirrors the pattern we saw back in April, in the US, with another major hip-hop release, J Cole’s KOD.
That album broke day-one records for US-only album streams on both Apple Music and Spotify – but did so on the former with 64.5m and on the latter with 36.7m streams.
Apple says that Scorpion has now broken both worldwide and US-only day-one records on its service.
Some notable points:
- Between just Spotify and Apple Music, Drake’s Scorpion attracted approximately 300m streams on its first day of availability. If the record manages to average half of that for the following six days, it will easily surpass a billion streams in its first week (1.2bn) just on these two platforms. And don’t forget – these numbers don’t include YouTube Music, Amazon Music, TIDAL, Napster etc.
- One very approximate rule of thumb for calculating how much a project’s rights-holders have been paid from streaming services is to multiply its streaming volume by $0.005 per-play. On this very rough basis, Scorpion would have generated $1.5m on Spotify and Apple Music alone yesterday;
- The previous week-one US streaming record for an album, across all formats, is Post Malone’s Beerbongs and Bentleys with 431m plays. Considering Scorpion attracted approximately 80.5m day-one streams in the US on Spotify alone (not including YouTube or Apple Music), it’s looking very likely this record will be crushed;
- Apple Music’s 170m day-one Scorpion global stream-count was 28.8% bigger than the approximate 132m streams seen on Spotify (which, again, is not an official number).
Music Business Worldwide
