Drake & Kanye's Streaming War Has a Clear Winner
Drake this, Kanye that. I don't really have an opinion on Certified Lover Boy or DONDA, the pair's respective new albums, but I can assert that the 24-hour Drizzy/Yeezy news cycle is exhausting.
Between the memetic lyrics, the creepy music videos, the shock-drops, and the endless, ceaseless hype — oh, remember that highly-publicized Drake vs. Kanye conflict? Even if it was manufactured buzz, its dark turn lent a real combativeness to the dual album drops
In fact, that whole beef seems tailormade to spark debates (and extra streams) about Certified Lover Boy and DONDA. Which one was better? Which was more worth waiting for?
There's only one objective truth here: as far as streaming is concerned, Drake's Certified Lover Boy blows Kanye's DONDA out of the water.
According to a few stat-tracking services, Certified Lover Boy raked in over 430 million audio streams in just three days — it took DONDA over eight days just to hit 423 million, so it'll only top the Billboard charts for one week before CLB takes its place.
Not to say that Ye ought to weep into his cashmere blankets: DONDA set plenty of records, including most first-day Spotify streams (153 million), topping Drake's previous LP, Scorpion.
A few days later, though, CLB reclaimed Drake's crown on Spotify and Apple Music. Tough luck, Yeezy.
Certified Lover Boy also won plenty of smaller honors, including the most one-day streams of a single ("Girls Want Girls" received over six million day-one streams), and it may soon enjoy the most simultaneous top 10 singles. Plus, CLB is a shoe-in for #1 on the US top albums chart, having received the approximation of 604k purchases in its first week alone.
Furthermore, Drake has secured nine of the top 10 Billboard Hot 100 spots, while the other 12 songs on CLB are in the top 40.
Kudos to both multi-multi-multi-millionaire musicians either way. After their requisite victory laps, perhaps Drake and Kanye can spend some time reflecting on why they saw fit to include alleged abusers and homophobes as guest features on their record-setting albums.
