Celebrity

Did Adele really break BTS’s first-day streaming record on Spotify?

The controversy over Spotify’s first-day streaming record between Adele and BTS has been ongoing for nearly a month and yet to subside.

After a six-year break from the music industry, British soul diva Adele has finally made a “comeback of the decade”, starting with the lead single Easy On Me. Quickly after the release of Easy On Me on different music platforms, Adele’s new song broke a series of records, in which, the most controversial one is probably the streaming record in the first 24 hours on Spotify.

BTS Adele
Easy On Me was recognized by Spotify as the most streamed song in a single day

A controversy recently erupted over whether or not Adele’s Easy On Me actually topped BTS’s Butter to become the most-streamed song on the first day of its debut on Spotify? The answer is yes!

Recently, Music Business Worldwide confirmed this record of Adele with a detailed analysis of Easy On Me‘s single-day stream performance on Spotify.

BTS Adele

Music Business Worldwide (MBW) is a leading music industry news, insight and analysis website that has collaborated with Rolling Stone and had direct interviews with Spotify many times, so it is considered a credible source to update the latest achievements and records of artists.

According to MBW, Easy On Me definitely broke BTS’s record with Butter’s 20.9 million single-day streams on Spotify. Easy On Me (19.75 million) also nearly doubled the chart-eligible single-day streams of Butter (11.04 million) on Spotify. 

BTS Adele

The controversy stemmed from BTS fans, who claimed that “Easy On Me” did not break Spotify’s first-day streaming record held by the Kpop boy group. BTS fans explained that Butter’s streams on the first day of its release were 20.9 million, thereby holding the record for the most streamed song in the first 24 hours, while Easy On Me with 24 million streams is the most-streamed song in “any day”. 

But here are two issues that need to be clarified: the filtered stream volume officially announced by Spotify on Spotify Charts and the “first-day” streams of Easy On Me.

BTS Adele

Spotify currently has two types of streaming metrics for popular tracks on its service: (1) Unfiltered, unpublished metrics that are not publicly available (sometimes with the exception of record labels); and (2) Filtered chart-eligible metrics that are published via Spotify Charts.

The second category is the official representation of the total number of chart-eligible streams a song earns on Spotify per day. Records are also measured based on the filtered data.

As reported by MBW in May, about half of BTS’s 20.9 million single-day streams with Butter (about 10 million of them) were “wiped out” from Spotify’s charts. In essence, this is because all of these metrics exceeded Spotify’s chart threshold for each user.

BTS Adele

Therefore, the exact numbers of one-day streams of Butter and Easy On Me as announced are 11.04 and 19.75 million respectively, Easy On Me is twice as high as Butter.

Moreover, did Easy On Me actually break Spotify’s first-day streaming record or is it only “any day”, as claimed by BTS fans? According to MBW, Adele timed her release of Easy On Me on unusual hours, midnight in the UK on October 15, which means that in the US, Easy On Me was released in the last hours of October 14.

Therefore, when calculating the streams of Easy On Me on October 15, a few hours are cut off, the total amount of time is only 20 hours. Easy On Me’s unfiltered streams are 24 million. Compared to BTS’s data, Easy On Me still surpassed Butter at this record.

To sum up, according to careful analysis from Spotify’s official data, Adele with Easy On Me has officially surpassed BTS with Butter, becoming the song with the highest first-day streams on Spotify.

BTS Adele
Source
K14
Back to top button