Drake's Scorpion sets streaming records and tops Billboard 200 under new stream weighting ...

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in iPod + iTunes + AppleTV
Scorpion, the fifth album from musician Drake, has become the first album to achieve 1 billion streams globally in a single week, a feat that aided the artist in reaching the top of the Billboard 200 album chart in the same week as the chart altered how streams are weighted in results.




Industry sources advised to Billboard the album had been streamed in excess of 1 billion times in the most recent tracking week, from June 29 to July 5. The previous record holder was Post Malone's "Beerbongs & Bentleys, which attained just under 700 million streams at the end of April.

Billboard also advised Drake had set a one-week record for audio streams from a single album in the United States, with 745.92 million recorded during the period. By contrast, Post Malone's album managed 431.3 million.

While Drake's top position on the Billboard 200 would most likely have occurred under earlier compilation rules, the week was the first under a new multi-metric consumption system. Measured in equivalent album units, it is comprised of traditional album sales, or a track equivalent album (TEA) of 10 individual tracks bought from an album, or from Streaming Equivalent Albums (SEA).

Originally announced in October last year, the change primarily surrounds how SEA is calculated. While previously all streaming services were lumped together into a single category, SEA is now split between streams from paid subscription on-demand streams, such as those from Apple Music and paid tiers of other services, and ad-supported on-demand streams, like Spotify's free service or YouTube.

Under the change, subscription-based streams have a greater weight, with 1,250 streams making up one SEA unit compared to 3,750 ad-supported streams.

Billboard claims the shift in streaming strategy is "reflective of a global push to measure streams in a revenue-reflective and access based manner." In short, because artists and labels will gain more revenue from subscription-based streams than ad-supported versions, such streams should be given more weight.

It is unknown exactly how much of an impact streaming made on Scorpion's sales, but Nielsen Music advises that out of 732,000 equivalent album units earned in the week, only 160,000 were from traditional album sales.

Apple Music is likely to have contributed significantly to the total, as it was recently revealed the album broke the service's single-day streaming record with more than 170 million streams. Main rival Spotify reportedly only managed 132 million streams in the same period, despite having a considerably higher total user base of free and paid users.

On Friday, a report surfaced claiming Apple Music had just overtaken Spotify in popularity in the United States.
nunzy

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 9
    nunzynunzy Posts: 662member
     Drake owes everything to Apple.  Without iTunes, he would be nothing.

    Apple came in and changed the entire music industry forever. Drake is reaping the rewards.
  • Reply 2 of 9
    Rayz2016Rayz2016 Posts: 6,957member
    So, a billion streams. 

    How much, roughly, would he earn earn from that?
  • Reply 3 of 9
    zoetmbzoetmb Posts: 2,654member
    nunzy said:
     Drake owes everything to Apple.  Without iTunes, he would be nothing.

    Apple came in and changed the entire music industry forever. Drake is reaping the rewards.
    That may have been the case when downloading dominated.  But downloading is now (as of calendar 2017) only 15.7% of industry sales (in dollars) and it will probably be even lower this year.   Downloads comprised 64% of industry dollars as recently as 2013.  Streaming in 2017 was 66.7%. of industry dollars, but total industry dollars, adjusted for inflation are only 40% of their former peak.
    SpamSandwichnunzy
  • Reply 4 of 9
    SoliSoli Posts: 10,035member
    Good for Drake, even if he is the Nickleback of hip-hop.
  • Reply 5 of 9
    fluffheadfluffhead Posts: 55member
    Soli said:
    Good for Drake, even if he is the Nickleback of hip-hop.
    Yes!
    SpamSandwich
  • Reply 6 of 9
    SpamSandwichSpamSandwich Posts: 33,407member
    Bloody Canadians.
  • Reply 7 of 9
    linkmanlinkman Posts: 1,035member
    Rayz2016 said:
    So, a billion streams. 

    How much, roughly, would he earn earn from that?
    Assuming that the report means one billion songs streamed and not one billion full album streams, then around $5.8 million USD was paid by the streaming services. Since we don't know how many streams per service and we don't know for certain the payouts for each service this is definitely a rough number. A big question mark is how much Drake gets of that because that money gets split further between the record label, publishers, rights holders, songwriters, etc.

    My simplified math: Spotify at $0.00380/song, AM at $0.00783/song, and 500M each for just these two services. If a significant number of plays are coming from a stingy payer such as Youtube or Pandora then it'll drag the amount down and conversely go up with bigger payers such as Tidal. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2018/01/16/streaming-music-services-pay-2018/
    mknelsonRayz2016
  • Reply 8 of 9
    avon b7avon b7 Posts: 7,624member
    nunzy said:
     Drake owes everything to Apple.  Without iTunes, he would be nothing.

    Apple came in and changed the entire music industry forever. Drake is reaping the rewards.
    I know you see it that way but Apple owes everything to subscribers and the artists. Not the other way around. Apple isn't providing a service that didn't already exist and even shunned streaming as a model at one point in time.

    If anything, Apple owes something to Drake (apart from money) for releasing something that creates demand.
    nunzyronn
  • Reply 9 of 9
    Rayz2016Rayz2016 Posts: 6,957member
    avon b7 said:
    nunzy said:
     Drake owes everything to Apple.  Without iTunes, he would be nothing.

    Apple came in and changed the entire music industry forever. Drake is reaping the rewards.
    I know you see it that way but Apple owes everything to subscribers and the artists. Not the other way around. Apple isn't providing a service that didn't already exist and even shunned streaming as a model at one point in time.

    If anything, Apple owes something to Drake (apart from money) for releasing something that creates demand.
    Don’t encourage him. 
    fastasleepronnnunzytmayoptik
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