Kendrick Lamar's sudden, surprise and potentially accidental release of his sophomore artist album To Pimp A Butterfly may not have been the cleanest of affairs, but the numbers it is already putting up are setting records. According to the TDE CEO, the album broke the Spotify record for most streams by an album in a single day. It got 9.6 million spins on the Swedish streaming service. According to a Billboard estimate, who confirmed total streams the number, those spins would net Kendrick and everyone involved with the album $44,160 globally.
To Pimp a Butterfly was streamed 9.6m times on the 1st day. new global record 4 the most streams in a single day worldwide by a new release
— dangeroo kipawaa TDE (@dangerookipawaa) March 17, 2015
The record for most global streams in the same day was previously held by Michael Buble's Christmas. Over the next few days, K.Dot will look to challenge the record held by Drake's If You're Reading This It's Too Late last month, who broke his own record previously. Drake's surprise mixtape went on to get streamed 17.3 million times over three days, which was also a record. We will see if K.Dot can keep up the momentum with his album over the next few days and into the weekend.
Part of the reason the album was streamed so many times was due to the back and forth that Kendrick's team and Interscope had with iTunes. The album was initially made available for purchase at midnight on Sunday, but it was taken down only to be re-released for good in clean and explicit versions. It is also a very dense record that needs multiple listens to be fully processed, so with the confusion about purchasing, this played into the hands of the streaming services.
Numbers for Rdio, Deezer and other streaming services have not been disclosed yet, but those numbers will only make the total rise even higher.
We will soon see the sales totals to see if the accidental release had any detrimental impact on album sales because so far, everything seems to be going great. Stream it on Spotify and grab it on iTunes.
