There's two people who without a doubt dominated the streaming world: Drake and Post Malone. The two artists had one hell of a year so far with Posty releasing his highly anticipated, Beerbongs & Bentleys and Drake releasing massive singles and his latest opus, Scorpion. It should come as no surprise that the two artists had the two highest volume of on-demand streams of the year thusfar.
According to Variety, Drake and Post Malone had the most amount of on-demand streams of 2018. Drake landed 3.3B streams thusfar while Post Malone is behind him at 3.1B. However, album sales have placed Post Malone above all artists for total album equivalent album consumption with 1.8M units (albums +TEA + on-demand audio SEA). Unshockingly, "God's Plan" is the most consumed song of the year. It's moved 5.3M units which includes 655M on-demand audio streams. Following "God's Plan" is Post Malone's "Psycho" and then Blocboy JB and Drake's collab "Look Alive."
The report says that despite Post Malone's album is dominating the total album equivalent audio consumption, Drake will likely beat that record. The report ended on June 28th, a day before Scorpion release.
Total album equivalent consumption is up this year as well by 18% after passing 400B streams for the first time ever. Access to music has never been as easy as it is in today's day and age. SVP Of Industry Insights at Nielson Music, David Bakula predicts streaming numbers will grow even larger in the next six months.
"The first half of 2018 has shown robust growth for the music industry, building upon the successes of the business in recent years," Bakula said. “Fans have never before had access to music on the scale that we see today, and we expect even more gains for the industry in the six months ahead.”