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Drake Adding “Hotline Bling” To “Views” Is An Extremely Smart Business Move

Drake‘s long-awaited album Views finally dropped last week. The sales numbers have been breathtaking, with Drizzy reportedly announcing that he sold a staggering 630,000 copies in one night, and already fast on its way to the top of the Billboard charts, with One Dance currently sitting at no. 2 behind Desiigner‘s mammoth Panda (and just ahead of Beyonce and Prince, who has re-entered the charts in a massive way since his tragic passing on April 21.)

It’s a long album, twenty tracks including “bonus” single Hotline Bling, the most viral hit of 2015 if not ever, a song that spawned memes, covers, in-depth opinion pieces analysing the modern musical landscape, and above all, a shit tonne of sales.

In fact, he sold so many copies of Hotline Bling that its addition to Views will pretty much single-handedly guarantee that it will go platinum really, really quickly. Bowing to the perils and game-changing nature of streaming, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) recently announced a new rule, that “1,500 on-demand song streams in the United States [hold] the same value as 10 individual track sales or 1 full album sale.”

Hotline Bling has been streamed 700 million times on Youtube and 400 million times on Spotify. Under the RIAA’s new rules, this is the equivalent of 267,000 album sales. Furthermore, One Dance has already received 67 million Spotify streams, while Pop Style, which initially featured Kanye and Jay Z as The Throne, but the album version is Drake only, has also enjoyed 17 million streams.

It’s a sneaky and very smart move, as the Hotline Bling numbers retroactively count towards those of views as a whole, as explained by Forbes. This means there’s essentially no doubt whatsoever that this album will go platinum – and fast.

Help Drake reach platinum (or y’know, just check it out because it’s a good album) by listening to Views here.

Image: Pitchfork/Youtube