Pusha T and Drake have one of the most famous hip-hop feuds of recent years. So, it’s not too surprising to see that when Pusha found a comparison that paints Kanye West’s new album Donda in a more positive light than it does Drake’s Certified Lover Boy, he was all over it.
It started with a recent tweet from XXL, which compares the Spotify streaming numbers of Donda and Certified Lover Boy on the albums’ first two days of availability. West’s album was streamed 94.5 million times on its first day before jumping up to 102.1 million streams on its second day. As for CLB, it had 153.4 million streams on its first day before falling drastically to 89.9 million the next day.
#DONDA and #CertifiedLoverBoy first and second day streams on Spotify:
Donda
First day; 94.5M
Second day: 102.1MCertified Lover Boy
First day: 153.4M
Second day: 89.9M— XXL Magazine (@XXL) September 5, 2021
It’s worth noting, though, that Donda was released at around 8 a.m. on a Sunday, as opposed to midnight on Friday like most albums are (including CLB). If you do the math, Donda and CLB actually had similar numbers in terms of average streams per hour on their respective first days: about 5.9 million and 6.4 million, respectively. So, looking at streams per hour on the album’s first days versus their second-day performance, they performed somewhat similarly, with Donda experiencing a smaller day-two drop-off but CLB reaching a higher peak. So, all in all, the numbers from that tweet don’t fully represent the situation at hand.
Anyway, somebody shared a screenshot of the XXL tweet and added, “i predicted this. i said drake’s day 1 is gonna be huge off the element of surprise then its just gonna drop. donda everyone heard in full 3 weeks before it dropped, still did these numbers and is only growing in streams. crazy!” Pusha seemingly agreed with the tweet, as he gave it a like.
i predicted this. i said drake’s day 1 is gonna be huge off the element of surprise then its just gonna drop. donda everyone heard in full 3 weeks before it dropped, still did these numbers and is only growing in streams. crazy! pic.twitter.com/uL3PH9hytg
— KENNY BEAR (@rapdose) September 5, 2021
When West released Donda, Pusha shared a congratulatory post about it, writing on Instagram, “This is about power, money, influence and taste…nothing more, nothing less. Watching you ‘joystick the culture”‘makes us all proud. Continue to do things your way, congrats, and I’m honored to have been a part of the process.”