Kanye West's 'Donda' set a bunch of streaming records on Apple Music

Kanye West’s Donda set an Apple Music record over the weekend following its release on streaming services this past Sunday. The mercurial artist managed to pull in over 60 million streams, making it the third-most-streamed album ever within its first 24 hours of release.

Additionally, the project managed to become Apple Music’s most-streamed pop album of the year and set the service’s charts on fire, nabbing spots on the top album charts in 152 countries. The latter of which is yet another record. In about a week we’ll see how these early numbers translate to the Billboard charts.

Brilliance or trolling? — As with many of West’s musical endeavors, the build-up to Donda’s release was an event in and of itself. As is often the case where West is concerned, the anticipation and fanfare leading up to the album dropping almost eclipsed the music itself.

For starters, the release of Donda was repeatedly delayed — the album was supposed to come out in late July, which then turned into August 6, and then August 22, before releasing a week later. Even after the delay, West seemed displeased, claiming that Universal put out the project without his approval.

The delays weren’t surprising given that West is a notorious perfectionist, but they did also feel at times like he was trying to create even more hype from it. There were listening parties for the record in some of the biggest stadiums in the world — including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta and Soldier Field in Chicago. And with every Kanye album comes the Kanye merch, this time partnering with Balenciaga to bring us $160 facemasks.

Past his prime? — Despite changing the entire rap landscape and giving us some of the album’s greatest albums of the past two decades, West has become nearly as recognized for his fashion efforts as he has for his music. To a younger generation, a new pair of Yeezys might be more meaningful than a limited edition CD of say, Late Registration. The man even has a quasi-holiday of sorts, with August 2 being unofficially hailed as Yeezy Day.

Regardless, the only thing we know about the artist’s remaining career trajectory is that his projects will continue to be grand, expansive, and be delivered as performance art. Whether he reaches or surpasses his previous peaks again or not remains to be seen, but one thing’s certain, tens of millions of people are going to tune in.