Taylor Swift's Apple Music streaming record crushed by new Cardi B album

Rapper Cardi B's first full-length release, "Invasion of Privacy," reached over 100 million streams in its first week on Apple Music — more than doubling the record for a female artist on the service, previously set by Taylor Swift's "Reputation."

"Invasion of Privacy" in fact managed to double "Reputation" figures by the middle of the week, according to official Apple numbers shared with The Verge. The album is now the fifth most-streamed title on Apple Music, surpassing even artists like Ed Sheeran and The Weeknd.

The achievement is particularly impressive in light of Apple's subscriber base. The company has north of 40 million paid listeners since launch on June 30, 2015, but that's still far less than Spotify's 159 million total active users it has accumulated since 2008, of which some 71 million are Premium customers.

Cardi B's numbers may be partially attributable to a general rap, hip-hop, and R&B focus of Apple Music. The Drake album "More Life," for example, initially saw 33 million more streams on Apple Music versus Spotify.

Apple recently claimed that it smashed Spotify's numbers in the recent premiere of new music by The Weeknd. The latter company challenged this assertion with numbers that exceeded what the record label claimed, saying it had topped Apple's 26 million streams in 24 hours by another 3 million — excluding two Spotify-exclusive music videos.

Apple Music could be poised to overtake Spotify in the U.S. in 2018 for paid subscribers, depending on whether growth rates earlier this year hold steady. The former does enjoy integration into every Apple device — and is the only service natively supported on the HomePod — but Spotify had a years-long headstart, and is not only platform-agnostic but integrated into smartspeakers by Amazon and Google.

9 Comments

racerhomie3 1264 comments · 7 Years

About 6 years ago

Spotify uses a proprietary system to identify songs & play them .

hhhhhh 4 comments · 10 Years

The article fails to mention that there are probably an extra 10 million new subscribers since Swift’s album release.

Mike Wuerthele 6901 comments · 8 Years

hhhhhh said:

The article fails to mention that there are probably an extra 10 million new subscribers since Swift’s album release.

Seems pretty obvious, given that it has grown 2 million in a month -- which we did link to.

peterhart 162 comments · 8 Years

I don't 'get' Cardi B...completely not my style. Amazing to watch who the world migrates to as time goes on.

holyone 398 comments · 8 Years

peterhart said:

I don't 'get' Cardi B...completely not my style. Amazing to watch who the world migrates to as time goes on.

I second that, she has shit verses heavily reliant on production generated vibe its hard to belive how well crap can sell, drake ofcause is on this too but at least he can drop proper bars when he feels loke it and is just probably riding the new wave, thank god for Kendrick. Every year music just gets even more shit than the last, wonder why that is, just when we thoght we saw the worst of it with justin b and 1D then comes this wannabe, the shitiest part is that the endless hord of idiots think that this wacko's better than niki. There other day I came to the scary realization that punk rock and rock were dead and I didn't even realized it had happened. Think about this, who's the new green-day, evanescence or even bink 182, whose this generation's nickle back or pink for that matter ? all those guys are gone and lets not even re-traumatize ourselves with linki'n park :'( . I like Taylor but reputation is neare irredeemable junk in comparison to her earlier stuff. Sorry to vent just my 2 cents.