Headlines over the last day have pointed to Drake overtaking Justin Bieber as the all-time most-streamed artist on Spotify, citing numbers on analytics aggregator Kworb. The feat — which covers global listening — is accurate, Spotify confirmed to Billboardthis morning.
The milestone is especially impressive given the limited time that the whole of Drake’s new record, Views, has been available on the platform — less than a week. Its first two weeks were spent as an Apple Music exclusive, yielding a streaming record of 245.1 million listens in the U.S. during the record’s first tracking week. (That sum includes plays of the album’s songs on Apple Music, as well as the handful of songs from the set that were available at other streaming services like Spotify.) Views quickly sold more than a million copies (1.03 million) in two weeks’ time, and it is the first album released in 2016 to surpass 1 million copies sold. Only two albums have sold more than a million this year: Views, and Adele’s 25, which was released in 2015.
