Quite the debut.
Dr. Dre's album Compton: A Soundtrack amassed 25 million streams worldwide in its first week with nearly 500,000 iTunes downloads, Apple Music executives told the New York Times on Sunday (August 16).
"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," Jimmy Iovine, the former record exec who built the Beats music service with Dre for Apple Music after the tech giant paid $3 billion last year to acquire Beats.
The initial numbers came the same day as the film the album is loosely tied to—Straight Outta Compton—generated $56.1 million in box-office ticket sales during its opening weekend. The movie is about the pioneering rap group N.W.A., which featured Dre as one of its members. Interestingly enough, though, Compton will debut on the Billboard charts Monday (August 17) second to country music star Luke Bryan's Kill The Lights.
Although Compton's numbers are respectable and show Dre's clout, considering it's the rap mogul and super producer's first album since 2001 was released in 1999, its showing still pales in comparison to big streaming rap hits earlier this year.
Drake's If You're Reading This It's Too Late in February tallied 48 million streams in one week, while Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly followed in March with 39 million streams of its own. But those albums did their numbers largely on the strength of Spotify.
Dre announced his new album on Beats1, Apple Music's Internet radio platform, and promoted it through Apple Music and iTunes.
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