After a bunch of delays, Kanye West finally released Donda on Sunday. West drummed up a ton of anticipation for the record ahead of its release, and while it’s far too early to tell where it and its songs will rank on the Billboard charts, we can tell already how well it has done on Spotify so far.
Indeed, it has thrived: On its first day of availability (August 29), the tracks on Donda racked up nearly 100 million streams globally (94,455,883, to be exact). According to Chart Data, that’s the second-largest album debut ever on the platform. The biggest debut of all time was had by Drake’s Scorpion, which enjoyed 132 million streams.
.@kanyewest’s 'DONDA' earned almost 100 million first day streams on the global Spotify chart, the second biggest album debut of all-time.
— chart data (@chartdata) August 30, 2021
It’s worth noting that Donda was released at around 8 a.m. and not midnight like most albums are, so these figures are based on just 16 hours of streaming activity as opposed to the more common 24. So, if you scale Donda‘s streaming numbers up to 24 hours, it could be inferred that had the album been released at midnight, it may have delivered over 141 million Spotify streams.
On the global chart, 16 of the day’s top 25 songs were from Donda. That dominance was even greater on the US chart, where 22 of the top 25 were Donda tracks, including the entire top 10. On both charts, the most popular Donda songs were “Jail,” “Hurricane,” and “Off The Grid.”