Drake’s Views — and songs on it — broke all kinds of streaming records in 2016, wether it was the most streamed album a day, the most streamed album in a year or the most streamed song in a year. But I didn’t realize how much it was streamed more than other albums.
Nielsen released its final 2016 numbers, and Views sold more than two million copies thanks to streaming, which is more than a million copies more than the next album, Rihanna’s ANTI (944,000 in sales from streaming). Overall, Views sold 4.14 million copies since it dropped April 25.
In terms of actual album sales, Adele’s 25 sold 124,000 more albums than Drake did in 2016, but her album was out for all 12 months as opposed to Drake’s seven and change.
But if you’re going to take away anything from this — yet another post about Drake and streaming — understand the magnitude, and that, no matter how good or bad or corny or solid the album is, songs from this album were streamed 3,000,000,000 times. That’s three billion. I don’t know when that will happen again, even with Drake.
Overall, 560.7 million albums were sold (including streaming), which is 3.1 percent more than 2015, according to Billboard. Although physical sales were down 16.7 percent (to 200.54 million in sales), the number of streams increased 39.2 percent to 431.74 billion.
Head to Billboard to see the top 10 in album sales.
