Dr. Dre’s Compton album (otherwise known as Compton: A Soundtrack by Dr. Dre) just racked up 25 million streams worldwide on Apple Music in its first week and has sold half a million downloads from iTunes, AppleInsider reports . Compton is the first Dr. Dre album released in 16 years.
The new Dr. Dre album is not without its advantages. Compton was released on August 7, a week before the release of Straight Outta Compton , the long-awaited film that inspired the album. Straight Outta Compton , which chronicles the rise and fall of hip hop group N.W.A. (a lineup that consisted of Dr. Dre, Arabian Prince, Eazy-E, Ice Cube, DJ Yella, and MC Ren), has sold 56.1 million tickets in its opening week.
As an Apple Music exclusive, the new Dr. Dre album serves as a litmus test for the upstart music streaming service. Launched on June 30, Apple Music is in a precarious position in a highly-competitive music streaming market that involves music industry giants like Spotify, Rhapsody, Google Play, and Pandora.
Dre announced his new album’s release via his exclusive Beats 1 radio program, The Pharmacy . Since then, the new Dr. Dre album has enjoyed heavy promotion through iTunes and Apple Music. Jimmy Iovine, who co-founded Beats with Dre and helped build the streaming service after Apple bought Beats for $3 billion last year, expressed his optimism in a report by The New York Times .
“We’re beginning to show what we can do in terms of communicating music to a worldwide audience and helping artists at the same time.”
Meanwhile, Dr Dre continues to rack up more revenue worldwide, as the tweet below suggests.
As reported earlier on Inquisitr , the new Dr. Dre album debuted at no. 2 on the Billboard 100 with 295,000 album units sold, trailing Luke Bryan’s new release Kill the Lights, which sold 345,000 album units. Apple’s senior vice president for Internet software and services, Eddy Cue, also said in an interview with The New York Times that Apple Music’s free 90-day trial subscription has attracted about 11 million users. Once the 90-day trial subscription expires, users can continue enjoying the service for $10 a month, which is about the same rate as many other streaming services charge for their monthly subscription.
Despite the impressive streaming and sales numbers, Compton isn’t nearly as successful as Drake’s album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late , which had about 48 million streams in its first week last February; or as Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly, which had 39 million streams in March. To put some perspective on the numbers, Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s albums had the more extensive reach, thanks in large part to the popularity of Spotify, which currently has 25 million subscribers around the world (not to mention the non-paying users that amount to about 55 million).
Both artists also promoted their albums via their respective social network accounts and multiple streaming services to bolster sales. Dre, on the other hand, relied solely on Apple Music’s exclusive user base. Which begs the question on whether Dr. Dre could have generated similar or even better numbers if he’d used the same marketing approach as Drake or Kendrick Lamar.
[Photo by Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images]