On its first full day of availability, Drake's new album More Life set a new record on Spotify of 61.3 million streams by users. Apple Music also hit a record number of streams for the same album: 89.9 million.
Drake's More Life on iTunes
Achieving 47 percent more streams than Spotify [this article inititally reported "68 percent" increase, an error in calculation] is particularly notable for Apple Music because Spotify has claimed over 100 million "active users" last summer, and 50 million "subscribers" earlier this month. Apple last reported a milestone of 20 million paid subscribers in December.
The streaming records, reported by the Verge, called Apple Music's outpacing of Spotify "no easy feat--especially with about 80 million less [sic] users," but noted that "Drakes ties to Apple Music and his radio show on Beats 1 helped push listeners to the service in droves."
Spotify's subscriber counts have generated some controversy due to the fact that it appears to count promotional subscriptions along with those that users actually sign up and pay for voluntarily. The streaming records reported by both companies appear to be the first public metric directly comparing actual usage, rather than flexible metrics of "subscribers."
In January, a report by The Trichordist stated that Apple Music paid nearly twice the streaming royalties of Spotify.
It noted that Apple paid out, on average, 7.35 tenths of cent per stream, compared to 4.37 from Spotify. Google Play Music paid 6.76 tenths of cent per stream, while the company's YouTube paid artists very little: only 0.69 tenths of cent per stream.