Drake outpaces Adele for top mid-year sales

"The growth of (streaming) is exploding," says David Bakula, Nielsen Entertainment's senior vice president of analytics. With Drake, "it's one of those things where you've got the right artist, the right fan base that is very active on streaming platforms and the right partner in Apple (Music)," which premiered Views exclusively on its service. He "continues to grow in popularity, so you have an artist at the peak of his game."

But how impressive is Drake's reign? When it comes to pure albums (both physical and digital), Adele actually tops mid-year sales with last year's 25, which sold 1.4 million copies between Jan. 1 and June 30, 2016, and only hit streaming services in mid-June. And although Drake's One Dance is the year's most "consumed" digital song when you factor in its 286.4 million streams, Flo Rida's My House easily bests it in sales (1.9 million downloads vs. Dance's 1.4 million).

Overall, total album sales dropped 14% from the first six months of last year (100.3 million), while digital song sales plunged 24% (404.3 million). The latter is partly due to the fact that one song hasn't captured the zeitgeist quite like Mark Ronson andBruno Mars' Uptown Funk!, which amassed 4.9 million downloads in the first half of 2015 alone. "We're not even in the ball park of coming up against that," Bakula says. "Unless you get a song that goes viral and is used everywhere, we're going to have a very tough time coming back in digital tracks."

But there are still some bright spots among the buying masses: Vinyl sales rose 3% to make up 12% of all physical music business, led by David Bowie's Blackstar(57,000 copies sold). And while Taylor Swift's 1989 was the only album to sell at least 1 million copies in the first half of 2015, 2016 has already laid claim to three platinum sellers (25, Views and Beyoncé's Lemonade, which has sold 1.2 million physical and digital copies since April). 

The real test of sales will come in the second half of the year, Bakula says. Despite releasing 25 in late November, Adele managed to score the top-selling album of 2015 in just a matter of weeks, with more than 8 million equivalent album units sold. Other fall releases such as Justin Bieber's Purpose (2.2 million) and The Weeknd's Beauty Behind the Madness (2.1 million) also landed among the year's top five best sellers.

"You look at the artists 'due' for an album, and you say, 'Hey, is there going to be a new Eminem record? A Taylor record? A Katy Perry record?' Which of these superstar artists are going to come with something in the fourth quarter that's going to help us in our struggle to (match) last year?" Bakula says. "Last year ended very strongly, the Adele numbers were out of this world. It's going to be very difficult to come up against that this year."