Records are made to be broken. It's just the way it is. And so, it looked like a long standing record of 25 years was about to be broken last week, when Drake was still number one in the UK with "One Dance".
The single had taken the top position in the charts 15 weeks ago and had managed to keep everyone else at bay. And with that, it was coming extremely close to a record set in 1991.
It was then when Bryan Adams released "Everything I Do, I Do It For You", which he wrote for the Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves movie featuring Kevin Costner. In the UK, the song held on the number one chart position for 16 weeks, before having to give the spot up.
If Drake's "One Dance" had managed to hold on for one week longer, he would've matched Bryan Adams' record, but unfortunately for him, Major Lazer, Justin Bieber and MO kept him away from achieving this. Of course, it could be a minor consolation to him that it took a collaboration of a few heavy weights in dance and pop music to take the spot from him.
A lot has happened to the calculation of chart positions between the Bryan Adams release and Drake's. While Bryan Adams sold over 1.8M physical copies in the UK for his song, Drake's numbers are an equation of 47,000 downloads and 5.56M streams, which translates to 5,560 physical sales. This is for all the weeks put together. To put that in perspective; Major Lazer and Justin Bieber generated 102,000 downloads in their first week. Drake didn't stand a chance there.
Altogether, Drake is the king of the streaming platforms. Since Billboard has incorporated streams into their charts, his album "Views" has also had a long run (of 11 weeks) at number one on the US album charts - despite the fact that album's reception was pretty mixed.
There is an interesting strategy though, on Drake's part, surrounding "One Dance". There's no video released for the song. There's no official lyrics video nor official music video. Many music professionals are stating, that this contributes to his success on streaming services. With YouTube out of the equation, fans are forced to listen to the album on streaming platforms and in some countries, like the UK, this reflects in his chart positions. The UK, as well as some other European countries, don't incorporate YouTube views in their chart calculations.
However, it's not a strategy Drake applies to all his music. Just a few days ago, he released a video for his collaboration with French Montana, "No Shopping".
