Drake smashes more streaming records on Spotify, Apple Music

Drake’s new More Life has broken more records on a number of streaming services, after its release on the weekend on digital and streaming formats.

He now holds the records for most first-day streams for an album and most single day streams for an artist on Spotify.

The service claims that More Life had a total of 61,302,082 streams on Sunday March 19. That broke the milestone for first day streams for an album, which Ed Sheeran set with ÷ (Divide) on March 3 with 56,727,861 streams.

Drake earned 76,355,041 total streams (including his other albums) on the same day, becoming the artist with the most streams in one day on the service. That was a record that was also previously set by Ed Sheeran on March 3 with 68,695,172.

Apple Music reported that More Life’s 22-tracks received 89.9 million streams in its first 24 hours – beating its performance on Spotify even though the service has 30 million less users.

That was a new single-day record for streams of songs from an album for Apple Music.

The three most popular tracks were Free Smoke, Portland and Passionfruit.

Clearly Drake’s close association with Apple Music in the past has spilled over. Last Saturday’s episode of his Beat 1 show OVO Sound Radio, where he premiered the album, had the most listeners ever for a Beat 1 show.

More Life is set to debut at #1 on the US charts, with 500,000 to 550,000 equivalent album units earned in the week ending March 23.

The last album to have the best first week was in May 2016 – when the Toronto-native’s own Views entered at #1 with 1.04 million units.

More Life gets a CD and vinyl release in a few weeks.

Earlier this week, Drake became the first artist to exceed 10 billion Spotify streams. The rapper was already its most streamed act of 2016, with over 4.7 billion global Spotify streams.

His chart-topping One Dance was the most streamed track of 2016 with over 880 million listens (making him an estimated US$485,300), and is Spotify’s most popular song ever.

The Views album was last September announced as the first to have 1 billion listens on Apple Music. It had also set a new record when it generated 245 million streams in its first week.