The Weeknd Breaks Justin Bieber’s Single-Day Streaming Record
The Weeknd‘s Starboy is currently in a dead heat with Kiss Land for the title of Worst Weeknd Album, but it is still doing numbers, people. It’s expected to hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 next week, and an announcement coming out of Spotify backs it up. The star has broken the single-day streaming record previously set by Justin Bieber almost exactly a year ago, according to Entertainment Weekly.
Spotify hasn’t released the stats yet, but whatever they are they eclipse Bieber’s 36 million single-day plays from November 13, 2015. To give you an idea, as of this writing, Starboy‘s title track is currently at the top of Spotify’s global charts with nearly 5 million streams, and there are 17 other tracks on his brand new album adding to the total.
Spotify exec Troy Carter congratulated The Weeknd in a statement: “We’re proud to have partnered with The Weeknd, his management, and Republic Records on a phenomenal album. We look forward to breaking even more records together in the near future.”
It shows that streaming is only going to become a bigger piece of the industry pie, and this news comes just as Spotify’s UK head of programming says he thinks Taylor Swift will bring her catalog back to the streaming service, which would probably help accelerate that trend.