Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX” Becomes Fastest 2024 Rap Album To Surpass A Billion Spotify Streams

Kendrick Lamar closed out his historic 2024 with GNX, and it turns out that the fourth-quarter album ended up becoming one of rap’s most quickly growing projects of the year, if not the most. Moreover, the LP recently became the fastest hip-hop album of the past twelve months to reach one billion streams on Spotify over the course of 37 days. Of course, this prompted a lot of discourse from dismissive fans who don’t find this as impressive, Drake Stans and K.Dot haters who pointed to faster albums like Certified Lover Boy and Scorpion, and defensive supporters pointing out how impressive this is regardless of other achievements.

No matter what side you fall on, you can’t deny that Kendrick Lamar has had to do very little this year to make his diss tracks, album, and moves cause a whole lot of discussion, hype, and acclaim in the hip-hop community. Sure, massive stages and headlines, plus being the best rapper of the moment, will carry you a long way. But at the end of the day, what the Compton lyricist actually shares and speaks on is all about the music. So it’s no surprise that GNX is full of amazing jams, and that lyrics from previous singles and diss tracks continue to resonate, even with their intended target.

Also, the album resonated with Kendrick Lamar’s peers as well, especially all those on the West Coast celebrating this big year for them. Tyler, The Creator recently dropped one heck of a Christmas gift with a freestyle over “hey now,” which is just about as colorful, energetic, and dynamic as the original cut. Hopefully we get a more formal collab between these two at some point down the road.

Meanwhile, Kendrick Lamar’s commercial astonishments with GNX will probably come with plenty of critical flowers in awards season when it’s eligible. But he already has some Grammy nominations for 2025 that might just manifest into big wins. At least, that’s what Eminem thinks, as he recently expressed that his “Love Game” collaborator deserves to sweep the awards. We can’t imagine Em will change his mind once this new album gets its own nomination… Most likely.