As a band that skews heavily towards younger listeners, it’s not surprising that Spotify has been an integral — and massively successful — platform in launching One Direction’s new single, Drag Me Down. But even the band themselves probably didn’t predict the meteoric rise of the track, which garnered 4.75 million streams on Friday to overtake Wiz Khalifa’s See You Again for the most streams in one day ever, according to Billboard.
In addition, the song has taken the number one spot on the Global Spotify Top 50 charts with an average of 3.11 million plays daily since debuting on Friday. That means that this one track is netting the song’s rights holders an average of $21,700 each day, according to an estimate by Music Business Worldwide.
Drag Me Down‘s instant success on Spotify is in part due to the band linking to the song’s Spotify page and the Swedish service itself heavily advertising the track on its platform worldwide. As MBW notes, the original song is also virtually non-existent on YouTube. This suggests that One Direction’s business team is putting forth a massive effort to keep the track on more profitable streaming services — and carefully deleting any unauthorized uploads of the song on YouTube.
The song overtook singles from Major Lazer (Lean On) and The Weeknd (Can’t Feel My Face) to earn the top spot as the most-played track currently. Over a third (1.1 million) of the song’s daily streams are coming from the US, while just 230,000 of the daily streams are coming from their homeland.
Drag Me Down is the band’s first official single since Zayn Malik departed from the band. It appears the band will is doing just fine without their fifth member.
Regardless of his status in the band, he’s a fan of the new song. “Proud of my boys the new single is sick,” said Malik on Twitter. “Big love :) x”
