Kendrick Lamar’s streams have skyrocketed after Super Bowl halftime

Since his controversial Super Bowl halftime performance, Kendrick Lamar’s streams have skyrocketed.
The day adhering to his Super Bowl Halftime Show headline performance, Kendrick Lamar’s catalog soared 154% on streaming services. According to a recent Billboard survey, his song received 70.9 million official on-demand streams in the United States on Monday. His well-known diss song “Not Like Us,” which received 222% more streams than the week before, continued to grow.

Music from Kendrick Lamar’s most recent album, GNX, was a mainstay of the show. He started the performance with “Squabble Up,” which saw a 159% increase in daily streams, while “Luther,” his collaboration with SZA, saw a 150% increase. The numbers for “TV Off” and “Peekaboo” increased by 139% and 186%, respectively. Overall, the album increased by 141%. With a 295% increase, Lamar and SZA’s song “All the Stars,” which was featured on the Black Panther album, was the largest climber. Speaking of SZA, she joined Lamar at the event and has since experienced her own streaming comeback. On Monday, her catalog increased by 58%.

The Halftime Show has been highly divisive despite the streaming spike because Lamar chose not to play many of his most popular songs. Dave Free, a co-founder of pgLang, clarified in a subsequent interview with The Wall Street Journal that it was never about “playing the hits.” “We wanted there to be a theatrical and cinematic component to this performance. We can state with confidence that no Super Bowl performance compares to this one,” he remarked. “It has the vibe of Black America,” he continued. How do we manage the narrative of what it means to be Black in America against how the outside world views it? What does Black America look like?

Later this year, Kendrick Lamar and SZA will join forces to go on the Grand National tour after their appearance at the Super Bowl Halftime Show. Starting in Minneapolis on April 19, the two will make stops in 23 cities in the US and Canada over the course of the next two months. On June 18, they will play their final show in the United States at Landover. After that, they’ll go overseas, making stops in Germany, England, France, and a few more nations before coming to an agreement in Sweden in August. The purpose of the trip is to promote GNX.