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That’s according to internal stats that Apple Music provides to its label partners, obtained by MBW, which reveal the platform’s first-week play-counts for recent chart-topping albums in the US.
We’ve checked according to Alpha Data: 226m. Apple Music share: 61.5%.
According to those internal Apple stats, Apple Music’s share has seen it claim a total market share of frontline hip-hop on-demand audio streams in the United States of 45% dating back to 2019.
Obviously, all of those streams were on a ‘premium’ service, with Apple Music – unlike rival Spotify – having no free tier. For this reason, it appears highly likely that Apple claimed more than 50% of frontline hip-hop streams on paid accounts in the period.
Indeed, sources close to Apple suggest the company believes it held a 50%+ weekly US market share of premium hip-hop streams for new releases in 94 out of the last 96 weeks, including an unbroken stream of 82.
MBW caught up with Apple Music’s Global Editorial Head of Hip-Hop and R&B, Ebro Darden, to ask his view on how a paid-for service like Apple Music could command such a large market-share of US hip-hop streams.
Although he wouldn’t comment on the numbers we obtained, Darden said: “The cultural part of the question has to do with the efforts of many people over several years in creating partnerships with artists that matter, and creating deeper relationships – whether that’s with Drake, Nicki Minaj, expanding into 52 new markets, including a range of territories in Africa such as Algeria, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic Records [255 articles]” href=”https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/companies/universal-music-group/republic-records/”>Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Libya, Morocco, Rwanda and Zambia.Music Business Worldwide
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