Yo Maps’ Try Again album has seen a massive over 80 million drop in streams of popular African digital streaming platform Boomplay, sparking curiosity on why such an incidence occurred, and its not the first time such has happened to the singer.
With 2023 seeing a major shift in music consumption patterns, from offline to digital streaming, Zambian artists’ streaming numbers saw an exponential growth and Boomplay was on the center of it, highly influenced by singer Yo Maps’ debut solo studio album Komando released the previous year.
In May of 2023, the singer released his highly anticipated second solo studio album, Try Again. With the lead single Try Again featuring Malawi’s Tay Grin already setting momentum for the official release, the album was propelled into an instant success gunning twenty million streams on Boomplay in one month.
The singer was on top of the world, setting trends, filling up venues to the brim and his value as an artist skyrocketed, something never seen before on the Zambian music scene as his booking got pegged at over 10,000 United States dollars. Yo Maps had his feet rooted into the ground, establishing himself as a prominent Zambian creative.
By December, 2024 – Yo Maps’ Try Again album had surpassed Chef 187’s Broke Nolunkumbwa to become Zambian most stream album on Boomplay with over 81.7 million streams but to everyone’s surprise the album now only has over 273,000 streams. It is important to note that the singer’s cumulative steam count has not been affected, hinting that it’s like a technical glitch. What happened for it to lose so many streams overnight?
Several factors could be attributed to causing loss of streams on a platform like Boomplay, Spotify, and Apple Music. Among those reasons could be platform glitches, re-upload, licensing issues, data recalibration, and fraudulent stream detection.
This is not the first time Yo Maps’ Try Again album has seen loss of streams or being taken down. In 2024, the singer’s Try Again album was taken down from YouTube, with reports suggesting that he lost over twenty million views.
Even though the singer remains the most streamed Southern African artist on the platform after accumulating over 300 million streams, fans remain critical of the singer management of being supposedly negligent with their brand.
Neither Yo Maps’ management nor Boomplay has given an official statement on the loss of streams. Social users who have noticed the loss in streams have wondered, will the management just like last time not give an official statement? Well, for now, many hope to see the issue rectified.
