Drake smashes streaming record
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Cellist brings sounds of ‘peace’ to nuns of Iraq’s Mosul
NEW YORK, July 1, (AFP): Drake has smashed streaming records with his new album “Scorpion,” with Apple Music and Spotify both reporting unprecedented listenership in its first day.
Apple Music said on Instagram that the Canadian hip-hop superstar’s fifth studio album was streamed 170 million times in the 24 hours since its release Friday.
The worldwide figure is the highest ever reported by any streaming service for an album over one day and comes even though Apple Music significantly trails industry leader Spotify in total users.
Drake has a lengthy relationship with Apple, which heavily promoted “Scorpion.” The hotly anticipated album inexplicably appeared two hours late on Spotify.
But “Scorpion” also set a record on Spotify, which heavily featured the album after it went alive.
The site Spotifycharts, which tracks listening data, said that Spotify users streamed the album’s 25 songs more than 132 million times over the first day.
The figures smash the previous record for one-day streaming — rapper Post Malone’s album “Bongs and Bentleys,” which was streamed just under 79 million times on Spotify on the first day of its release in April.
Streaming records are being frequently broken as growing numbers of listeners embrace Spotify, Apple Music and competitors such as Deezer and Tidal, which allow unlimited on-demand music.
Just days ago, the Colombian reggaeton star J Balvin surpassed Drake as the artist with the most regular monthly listeners on Spotify — but Drake quickly retook the crown with “Scorpion.”
Drake has found massive success releasing sprawling albums and mixtapes of danceable tracks online without consideration to physical formats.
“Scorpion” features a posthumous duet with Michael Jackson, a collaboration with rap great Jay-Z and an admission that Drake secretly had a son with Sophie Brussaux, a French actress in pornographic films.
Iraqi cellist and conductor Karim Wasfi has played a concert for “peace and co-existence” amid the ruins of Mosul, almost a year after Iraqi forces ousted the Islamic State group from the capital of its self-declared “caliphate”.
Dozens of people attended on Friday as Wasfi, in full concert dress, played on a makeshift stage among the most iconic religious monuments of Iraq’s second city.
The venue lay between the Catholic church of Our Lady of the Hour with its famed clock tower and the remains of the iconic Hadba (“hunchback”) leaning minaret next to the Nuri Mosque, destroyed during the battle for the city.
Wasfi was joined by the violinist, guitar and oud players of local band Awtar Nerkal.
“This music is a message from Mosul to the whole world, of the concepts of security, peace and coexistence,” said Wasfi.
The dual Iraqi-US national is former conductor of Iraq’s National Symphony Orchestra and has been nicknamed “Iraq’s Rostropovich” after the Russian maestro cellist.
The music was “a call for companies, investors and organisations to come and take part in the reconstruction of the city, especially its destroyed Old Town”, the bearded and bespectacled artist said.
The impromptu concert came in the same week that Iraqi authorities finally launched clean-up operations in the city that jihadists held for three years until their ouster in July 2017.
Several times over the past three years, Wasfi, who was born in Cairo, has taken his cello onto the streets of Baghdad to play at bomb sites shortly after attacks.
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