CHILE ONE, CLEO ICE QUEEN & F JAY’S ALBUMS FACE SPOTIFY STREAMS DROUGHT, SONGS FAIL HITTING 1,000 STREAMS IN FIRST 24 HOURS
Zambian music lovers had a lovely week as top talents Chile One, Cleo Ice Queen, F Jay and K Millian released their highly anticipated albums EAGLE ONE, I AM HER, SLEPT ON, and FULL CIRCLE respectively.
Apart from Cleo Ice Queen’s I AM HER, the other artists have not released their albums on boomplay, probably owing to digital distribution services abandoning distributing to the said platform earlier this year.
On spotify, a search revealed K Millian’s album not being available on the platform.
After a check on the available albums’ songs after over 24 hours since their rollout to Spotify, it was was found that that apart from singles released weeks or months leading to the official album release date, showed to have accumulated below a thousand streams.
Contrary to their usual performances on boomplay, where they achieve hundreds of thousands to millions of streams within a day, the albums have seen a poor performance on Spotify.
Zambian artists have been campaigning to switch to better paying digital streaming platforms such as Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, etc, and for the first time, many artists have released their albums to these platforms.
Music grows – like many of their albums have grown to achieve admirable figures, these albums are highly likely to grow and achieve the numbers they deserve as they are amazing projects.
Meanwhile, the albums uploaded on YouTube such as EAGLE ONE and FULL CIRCLE have seen a more favorable performance, notably Chile One’s Eagle One which has accumulated over 9.5 million views which includes over +1.5 million views in the 24 hours since its official release.
Several fans and industry observers have argued that lack of Spotify localized marketing and insufficient migration of fans from Boomplay to global platforms such as Spotify might be a contributing factor to the low numbers.
The albums’ underwhelming performance on Spotify has sparked debate about the effectiveness of the Zambian artist’s strategies of music distribution, notably, when transitioning to global platforms such as those mentioned.
The low streaming numbers may not necessarily reflect the true popularity of these artists locally, but they highlight the pressing need for better strategic rollout, visibility across multiple platforms, and promotion.
