Data says Nicki Minaj does more for artists’ streaming numbers than Drake

Nicki Minaj appearing on your record leads to a bigger boost in Spotify streams compared to Drake, new research by FiveThirtyEight claims.

According to a dataset pulled from the streaming service, from January to October of 2015, any track featuring Drake as a guest artist was streamed 126 percent more often, on average, than other tracks on the artist’s album.

In other words, having Drizzy on a song meant nearly double the amount of streams as any song an artist made without him.

However, when compared to the effect of Miss Minaj appearing on a song, tracks were played 172 per cent more regularly.

It’s not just on albums produced by less well-known artists. On Justin Bieber’s ‘Believe,’ the song ‘Beauty and a Beat,’ was streamed 70 percent more often than the rest of the the album’s top songs in the first 10 months of this year.

Drake was also on the album, appearing on “Right Here”, but the song was streamed 14 percent less often than the rest of the album’s comparable songs.

Lil’ Wayne was added to the dataset as he’d appeared on more than double the number of albums (192) compared to Drake (63) or Minaj (62). However his hit-making potential lead to a mere 21 percent bump in stream plays.

The study went further by breaking down the performance and popularity of each of the albums in to four groups.

Focusing only on the albums that performed above average for a Nicki or Drake appearance, Minaj’s impact was more than double that of the Hotline Bling star.

What does that mean? Well, Minya Oh, a DJ on New York’s Hot 97 radio station has a theory:

“Nicki is engineering all of her collaborations to be successes, and Drake is engineering his to be successes in less quantifiable ways.”

Minaj is only looking to work with artists who can help grow her popstar credentials, where as Drake is trying to keep things a bit more on the DL musically speaking.

I however, have my own theory. Does the Web’s love of Drake Hunts, Drake memes and Drake Christmas sweaters mean we have now reached ‘peak Drake’?

Only time will tell.

➤ The Drake Effect Is Real, But The Nicki Effect Is Bigger [FiveThirtyEight]