But even if Drake’s Friday release eclipses Kanye’s, it likely won’t top Donda for sheer intrigue. How those two giants wound up going head to head with back-to-back album releases is an additional part of Donda’s mystique. The album is already on track to score the biggest debut of 2021, although Drake’s forthcoming album Certified Lover Boy, due out on September 3, might immediately challenge Kanye’s sales title. When it was finally released early in the morning on August 29, Donda smashed first-day streaming records and claimed the second-biggest Spotify album debut in history, racking up 94 million and 60 million streams on Spotify and Apple Music respectively.
(The listening parties quickly became a form of elite cultural currency, with fans who attended treating each concert like a bougie Met Gala you can reportedly buy air from the concerts if you have $60,000 or so.) A string of pre-release listening parties saw thousands of listeners flocking to stadiums in Atlanta and Chicago for dramatic previews of the album. The release delays after an initial July 23 drop date helped give Donda one of the most drawn-out and lucrative hype cycles for a release in recent memory.
Reportedly in production for the last 18 months, Donda has had a rocky road to release, as delay upon delay befell the album’s production and Kanye wrestled with a high-profile divorce, mental health battles, and clashes with his album collaborators. These aren’t the typical questions you associate with an album release, but Kanye West isn’t a typical artist, and his new 27-track album, Donda (named after Kanye’s late mother Donda West), isn’t a typical album. So what’s the deal with Donda? Did Kanye West’s label really release it without his permission? Did Kanye really light himself on fire over it? What about the TikTok panic that he inducted the huge audiences at his listening parties into some dark occult ritual?
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