The Death of the Streaming Mega-Hit? 📉
Drake's latest album completes a week of being released on streaming platforms, & data released by Spotify reveals a stark trend developing in Pop Music Culture
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What’s good everyone?
Last week, Drake dropped his 6th studio album- ‘Certified Lover Boy’ on all streaming platforms and as expected, the Internet stopped shop to take notice 👀
Just a week after Kanye West released his 10th studio album ‘Donda’, amidst much beef between the two rappers, Drake recorded the highest streams ever on the 1st day of an album release on Spotify, with a mind-boggling 153 million streams 🎧
The previous record?
Also held by Drake for his 2018 album- ‘Scorpion’, which raked in 132 Million streams on Day 1 itself 🦂
Scorpion, also holds the record for the highest number of streams in Week 1 of any album on Spotify, with hit singles such as ‘God’s Plan’ and ‘In My Feelings’ becoming Pop Culture classics.
The dance routines going viral on TikTok helped push the Scorpion streaming numbers to around 559 million streams in just its 1st week on Spotify 🤯
Is CLB poised to beat that? 👊🏻
Far from it.
According to a latest report from Music Business Worldwide, Drake’s latest album will fall way short of his 2018 hit, and hints towards an interesting trend shift, the ‘Death of the Streaming Mega-Hit’ ☠️
As morbid as that may sound, despite a bumper opening day, official data released by Spotify shows that streams for CLB have started tapering off 👇🏻
With a 66% drop in streams on Day 5, data shows that listener interest is waning off in the album 🥱
While it is usual for album streaming numbers to drop down as the week progresses for obvious reasons of the Day 1 hype, this rate of fall has been drastic, even for Drake.
What’s the reason for this drop?
I could don my music critique hat and say that Donda is a much better album than CLB, and that data clearly shows listeners switching from CLB to Donda 👇🏻
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However, I believe there’s more to this 🤔
With around 60,000 tracks now pouring onto Spotify every day, the competition for listeners is more intense than ever, especially when compared to back in 2018 🗓
CLB has been released into this changing landscape.
Its performance clearly points towards the sinking streaming market share of modern Pop Stars, whose popularity on Spotify has plateaued over the past 3 years, while the platforms themselves have continued to grow 👇🏻
What does this mean?
Despite a 100% increase in the subscriber base of a streaming platform, Drake cannot outdo an album he dropped 3 years ago.
There’s simply too much music available for everyone, and attention spans are too too short to produce a traditional ‘Mega-Hit’
There are 365 Million monthly active users on Spotify, yet 84% of them are simply not interested in Drake’s music 🤷♂️
My objective here is not to bash Drake, but to point out the obvious, when it come’s to the changed landscape in music streaming.
Our take on this?
For decades, the record industry has turned its attention and investment to one thing above any other: the hit record.
However, the concept of the Mega-Hit song is becoming irrelevant, faster than anyone could have anticipated.
The commoditisation of music has meant that listeners do not value the release of albums as much as they did earlier, and artists who pour their heart and soul, and more importantly time into their work, are not rewarded equitably for it.
Why so? My personal take is that the subscription model is to be blamed.
At $10/month, one can access millions of songs on-demand at their fingertips. Compare that to even 20 years back, and any album used to cost roughly $10 in itself.
It may be a cut-throat deal for fans, but do you not think that it has made us value the music way lesser?
My creative/rant juices flowed earlier this week on Twitter, and maybe there’s a solution to this in the below thread 🧵 👇🏻
What do you think?
Would you pay more than you already do for streaming, if it meant supporting your favourite artist directly, and getting rewarded for it in return?
Let us know in the comments!
That’s it for today, and have a good weekend guys 🍻
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