Drake s new album will be a f Music exclusive
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Canadian hip-hop superstar Drake was Spotify's biggest artist of last year, clocking up a ridiculous-sounding 1 . 8bn streams across 46 million listeners.
These days, 3 years since his final solo studio album 'proper', 2013's Nothing Was The particular Same, Drake continues to pull in 21. 5m
monthly listeners within the platform.
It means he's Spotify's seventh biggest artist right now - and that a lot more than a fifth associated with Daniel Ek's total worldwide active users believed Drake in the past 4 weeks.
Later this 30 days, however, those listeners could be in for a bit of a shock.
Drake has just confirmed that his new album, Views (Aka 'Views From The 6')
, will end up being released on Friday, April 29.
The best news: is actually going to be an Apple Music streaming exclusive - in certain sense, from least.
Details of the particular record were revealed upon Beats 1's OVO Sound Radio
(via Apple Music) yesterday, where Drake said: "Thank you Apple Music - always, man; thank you to Jimmy [Iovine] and thank a person to everybody who supported the 2 singles that we all dropped [this week], Pop Style and 1 Dance.
"I'm excited, man. We're close and We have got something special to share with you. inch
Drake then tweeted that the release would end up being an Apple Music special
- before deleting the particular missive - but Apple has since confirmed in order to reporters that he has been telling the truth.
We're yet to know what form this exclusive is going to take plus, crucially, how long it is going to shut other platforms such as Spotify - plus TIDAL
, Google Play
and Deezer
- out of the particular game.
What we do understand for sure is that this story has already been a long time arriving.
Drake's profile on Spotify.
Screenshot
Rumours last year suggested that will Apple Music had authorized a $19m
deal with Drake, which included some assurances of exclusive material.
Many wondered just how such a deal would certainly shake out, consider after that, we've seen a series of nods towards a special partnership between the artist and brand:
In June last year, Drake appeared upon stage at WWDC in San Francisco to trumpet, amongst other things, the particular possibilities of Apple Music's Connect
system. He was wearing a jacket emblazoned using the traditional Apple logo;
Drake's greatest single to date, Servicenummer Bling
, came a month later. It was boosted by a colourful video which, it later emerged, was paid for in full by Apple. It currently provides over 654m views on YouTube/Vevo;
The particular OVO Sound Radio
programme, which showcases artists signed to Drake's OVO label as properly as other emerging works, debuted on Apple Music's Beats 1 nine weeks ago. So far, OVO has recorded and 'aired' 19 shows on the platform;
Drake & Future's US Simply no. 1 mixtape, What A Time To Be Alive
, was released as a windowed Apple Music streaming exclusive in October last year. It eventually arrived on other platforms including Spotify;
An OVO signing, the mysterious R&B duo DVSN
released their particular debut album as an Apple Music exclusive final month
;
Two new singles from Sights
, Pop Design and something Dance, were released a week ago and, officially talking, are 'Apple Music exclusives'.
When it comes to streaming's exclusivity wars, this is perhaps the biggest deal yet: Apple Music going out of the way to raid the particular appeal one of Spotify's most prominent superstars.
Then again, the nature of this kind of deal will be no longer anything such as anomalous.
As MBW covered last month, the number of blockbuster artists holding back materials from Spotify for also a limited period is https://t.co growing all the time.
In order to a range of degrees, it's a strategy that has been then musicians including Gwen Stefani, Jay Z, Coldplay, The 1975, Dr. Dre, Taylor Swift plus Kanye West.
You might also need to wonder what TIDAL, which usually has made its title nabbing exclusives from the particular biggest R&B/hip-hop artists on the planet, label of Drake and Apple's cosy relationship.
Drake was notable by his absence in the just about all star TIDAL launch press conference in Ny last year, where the loves of Kanye West, Jay Z, Jay Cole, Nicki Minaj, Beyonce, Usher, Rihanna and Alicia Keys produced an appearance.
He shows up to have placed his bets elsewhere?Music Business Worldwide