How Hip-Hop Dominates Streaming
Kendrick Lamar’s album ‘To Pimp A Butterfly” broke the first day streaming record on Spotify, ‘Compton’ became the first iTunes digital only album to hit no.1 in the U.K and Drake is the first artist in 2015 to hit 1 million sales of his album ‘If You’re Reading This Its Too Late’ in the U.S.
Now a new music report for the first six months of 2015, has put more numbers behind the charts and tracked streaming data of more than a trillion online plays in total. Next Big Sound reports that ‘a trillion streams took place across YouTube, Vevo, Spotify, SoundCloud, Vimeo, Rdio and Pandora in the first half of 2015.’
Hip-Hop dominated across all of the streaming services with the 2015 streaming numbers featuring an entire Top 5 of Hip-Hop artists – Kendrick Lamar, Meek Mill, A$AP Rocky, Future and Big Sean.
Drake is also the No.1 artist on most services including Rdio, Pandora and he’s also aligned closely with Apple Music featuring his OVO Sound Radio show on Beats 1 as well as previewing exclusive material on Apple Connect.
SoundCloud, is still growing and compared to last year, in June 2014, it attracted 2.5bn streams, with Drake, who again led the charge at No.1, posting new exclusives from himself and other artists on his OVO Sound label on his SoundCloud page. SoundCloud, now boasts over 250 million monthly users and has acquired a dedicated following of music fans seeking out mixtapes and Dj mixes. In May 2015 alone, Soundcloud tracked 5 billion plays over one month on its platform.
On Social Media, Next Big Sound ‘tracked close to 14 billion new followers, page likes, and stations added in the first half of the year’. Fetty Wap grew the largest following on Instagram adding 1.1 million new followers to his Instagram page in the first 6 months of the year.
Looks like its been a huge year for streaming and social media and while artists debate who’s getting the bulk of the royalty check – looks like these numbers aren’t going to be falling anytime soon.
