Drake's Scorpion on Apple Music crushes Spotify in streaming

Scorpion, Drake's fifth album, has smashed through his own single-day streaming record on Apple Music with more than 170 million streams in its first 24 hours. Spotify reportedly only reached about 76 percent of that traffic, despite claiming 120 million more users.

The numbers were reported by Micah Singleton of The Verge, based on figures supplied by Apple Music. Scorpion massively exceeded More Life, Drake's last album, which had held a record of 89.9 million first-day streams on the service.

Apple stated that Scorpion achieved both U.S. and global streaming records on Apple Music, and also represents the largest single-day streaming volume of any album on any streaming service.

Apple Music pulled out all the stops in promoting Scorpion, launching a website for fans to style their own photo into Scorpion album cover art and even giving Siri something to say when users asked about Drake's nicknames.

Apple Music is working overtime for

This is what happens when you ask Siri what Drake's nickname is pic.twitter.com/3fbRKvKAhA
— Micah Singleton (@MicahSingleton) June 28, 2018

Spotify's public charts reported streaming the same album over 132 million times in its first 24 hours, breaking its own single-day streaming record. The Verge noted that Spotify said its number "may end up being higher, when it finishes tallying the results."

Spotify sought to win the Scorpion streaming war by placing the sure-hit album on almost 30 of its popular playlists via a "global artist takeover," hitting 10 million streams per hour. Despite those efforts, Apple Music still passed Spotify up despite claiming far fewer subscribers.

Scorpion is expected to "easily shatter" the current single-week streaming record now held by Post Malone's Beerbongs & Bentleys, with 431 million streams.

67 Comments

panoptician 65 comments · 11 Years

About 6 years ago

Maybe Spotify users just have more discerning taste. I know I'm listening to Pusha T's Daytona instead.

ireland 17435 comments · 18 Years

This is what it’s come to? We are using Drake now? Who cares who’s number 1 for streams, or whatever. The only metric that really matters is the quality, reliability, usability and feature set of a service. I couldn’t care less who has the most streams. I’m a user of Apple products, not a stockholder of them.

Dan_Dilger 1584 comments · 13 Years

ireland said:

This is what it’s come to? We are using Drake now? Who cares who’s number 1 for streams, or whatever. The only metric that really matters is the quality, reliability, usability and feature set of a service. I couldn’t care less who has the most streams. I’m a user of Apple products, not a stockholder of them.

That's a baffling comment.

It's very newsworthy that Apple Music has significantly fewer subscribers but is attracting far more actual demand for an artist who is leading in streaming globally.

There are lots of "quality" services that went out of business because nobody cared to use them.

kkqd1337 468 comments · 12 Years

If there is a worse way of judging how popular a streaming service is than using a Drake album then I would love to hear it.

I use Spotify. I don’t know, want to know, or care who Drake is.

mark fearing 439 comments · 16 Years

kkqd1337 said:

If there is a worse way of judging how popular a streaming service is than using a Drake album then I would love to hear it.

I use Spotify. I don’t know, want to know, or care who Drake is.

That's not the point. The article isn't asking you about your particular taste in music, who you stream and why you do or don't listen to 'Drake'. I don't listen to him either, but from what I can see in the popular culture around me many people do. That in and of itself doesn't matter. But the issue of why Spotify has so much lower numbers than a service with ( is it a third less subscribers?) is interesting. What it makes me think is that Spotify continues to BS their numbers. I worked for years for a very large electronics company that also owns media companies (and music labels) and online numbers for various types of games and interactions were known to be BS. They were often decided on (made up) in marketing meetings. So what I suspect is that Spotify is being used far less than we are being lead to believe.