{"id":2422126,"date":"2026-05-18T17:41:32","date_gmt":"2026-05-18T17:41:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2422126"},"modified":"2026-05-18T17:41:32","modified_gmt":"2026-05-18T17:41:32","slug":"drakes-three-new-albums-break-records-on-streaming-services","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/drakes-three-new-albums-break-records-on-streaming-services\/","title":{"rendered":"Drake\u2019s three new albums break records on streaming services"},"content":{"rendered":"<br><div>\n\n\t\t\n\t\t\n<p>You have to hand it to Drake. Having spent\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/musically.com\/2026\/03\/20\/drakes-newest-teaser-in-year-long-iceman-album-rollout\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">the last year stoking fans\u2019 anticipation<\/a>\u00a0with teasers for his new \u2018Iceman\u2019 project, he pulled a switcheroo by releasing three new albums on Friday (15 May).\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>\u2018Iceman\u2019 is one of the three: 18 tracks of new music as expected. But it was accompanied by the 14-track \u2018Maid of Honour\u2019 and 11-track \u2018Habibti\u2019 as well. All three were released by OVO under exclusive licence to UMG\u2019s Republic Records, which we\u2019ll come back to in a minute.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>It\u2019s partly a flex of genre range: harder-edged rap on \u2018Iceman\u2019, a more R&amp;B\/sad-bangers feel to \u2018Habibti\u2019 and then not-sad actual-dance-bangers on \u2018Maid of Honour\u2019. But releasing three albums in 2026 is also a flex for streaming stats.\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n<aside>\t\t\t\n\t\t<\/aside>\n\n<p>Drake duly became the most-streamed artist in a single day on Spotify this year; a 1,100% increase in simultaneous listeners on Apple Music, where \u2018Iceman\u2019 topped its charts in 79 countries; and the biggest first-day streaming debut globally on Amazon Music in 2026.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>At the time of writing, Drake has\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/playlist\/37i9dQZEVXbMDoHDwVN2tF?si=bb6b312676954d73\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">12 of the top 20 songs on Spotify\u2019s global daily chart<\/a>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0all of them from \u2018Iceman\u2019 \u2013\u00a0although his top track \u2018National Treasures\u2019 is still just over 1m daily streams short of Michael Jackson\u2019s cinema-assisted chart-topper \u2018Billie Jean\u2019.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>(Depending on when you read this, the chart may have refreshed, but this was correct at the time of writing.)\n\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>On Spotify, \u2018Iceman\u2019 currently has 395.4m streams, although 194.7m of them came from lead single \u2018What Did I Miss?\u2019, which came out last July.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>\u2019Maid of Honour\u2019 has 242.8m streams (but 201.8m of them are for Central Cee collaboration \u2018Which One\u2019 which also came out last July) while \u2018Habibti\u2019 has 42.8m streams with no boost from earlier-released singles. So, clearly it\u2019s \u2018Iceman\u2019 doing the heavy lifting breaking those DSP records for now.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>What any of this means depends on whether you like Drake or not: you can expect several days of hot, lukewarm and (ice) cold takes on whether the triple-album salvo makes him a comeback king or an underperforming fraud. The sensible response is to watch the stream-counts over the next month.\n\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>We were interested to see one of the takes so far,\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/www.investing.com\/news\/stock-market-news\/drake-tripledrop-ignites-speculation-of-umg-exit-4693103\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">from Investing\u00b7com<\/a>, focus on what Friday\u2019s multi-drop means for Drake\u2019s contractual relationship with UMG. The speculation being that it could be \u201can attempt at satisfying contractual obligations\u201d with the major.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>The analysts speculating may well know as little as we do about the actual terms of Drake\u2019s licensing relationship with Republic\/UMG, including whether it\u2019s for a specific number of projects or not.\n\n\n\n<\/p><p>However, with the star\u2019s legal battle against UMG still rumbling \u2013\u00a0he is\u00a0<a rel=\"nofollow\" target=\"_blank\" target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/musically.com\/2026\/03\/30\/umg-hits-back-at-drakes-appeal-in-not-like-us-lawsuit\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">appealing the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit<\/a>\u00a0\u2013\u00a0speculation about whether a contractually-satisfied parting of the ways is in his future is inevitable. Fans, meanwhile, have three new albums worth of lyrics to mine for clues on his intentions.\n\n\n<section id=\"block-35\" class=\"below-content widget widget_block\"><nav class=\"jp-relatedposts-i2 wp-block-jetpack-related-posts\" data-layout=\"grid\" aria-label=\"Related Stories\"><h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Related Stories<\/h3><\/nav><\/section><section id=\"block-32\" class=\"below-content widget widget_block\"><aside>\n\t\t<\/aside>\n<\/section><section id=\"block-25\" class=\"below-content widget widget_block\">\n\n<\/section><\/div>\r\n<p><em> \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\r\n<p><em> \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You have to hand it to Drake. Having spent\u00a0the last year stoking fans\u2019 anticipation\u00a0with teasers for his new \u2018Iceman\u2019 project, he pulled a switcheroo by releasing three new albums on Friday (15 May). \u2018Iceman\u2019 is one of the three: 18 tracks of new music as expected. But it was accompanied by the 14-track \u2018Maid of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2422127,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25179],"tags":[25844,343720,21737,46171],"class_list":["post-2422126","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-drake","tag-republic-records","tag-top-stories","tag-universal-music-group"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Drakes-three-new-albums-break-records-on-streaming-services.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422126","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2422126"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422126\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2422128,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2422126\/revisions\/2422128"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2422127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2422126"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2422126"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2422126"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}