When Drake released the track list for his highly anticipated VIEWS album earlier this week, one of the more notable inclusions was his smash 2015 “Hotline Bling.” The 20th and final track, the song’s presence on the album might have been a very strategic move. As previously reported, online streams count toward album sale counts. According to the RIAA “1,500 on-demand song streams in the United States [hold] the same value as 10 individual track sales or 1 full album sale.”
This also applies to songs that are released as a single prior to the full album that they appear on. In July of 2015, Drizzy released “Hotline Bling” to much fan fare, and things went up another notch when he unveiled the music video, helping the track reach no. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100. Thus far, the song has been streamed 400 million times on Spotify and 700 million times on YouTube. To put things into perspective, 400 million streams totals out to 267,000 albums sold. Furthermore, “One Dance” and “Pop Style,” two songs that also appear on VIEWS, have been streamed 67 million times and 17 million times on Spotify respectively.
Respect: HNHH
