Apple’s one-week exclusive access to Drake’s latest album Views appears to have paid off. Despite the fact that it was available for streaming on Apple Music as well as downloads in iTunes, the WSJ reports that the album sold over a million copies in less than five days. Over 600k of those sales were made in the first 24 hours.
The streaming numbers were also impressive.
Apple Music users streamed the album more than 250 million times worldwide, 200 million of those times in the U.S., suggesting that Apple Music was able to get a good number of customers to sign up for free trials of its paid-only service beyond its current roughly 13 million paying subscribers and several million existing trial users.
Drake’s record label was also said to have been working hard to maximize sales by taking down pirate copies.
His record label’s parent company, Vivendi SA’s Universal Music Group, employed dozens of staff to keep “Views” videos off sites such as Alphabet Inc.’s free YouTube where they have been uploaded by users without permission, a labor-intensive process on which the record company spends millions of dollars a year to protect its big releases, a person familiar with the matter said.
Drake’s close relationship with Apple includes his Beats 1 radio show, where he is the second most popular artist after The Weeknd, and sponsorship of his upcoming tour.
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