In the 11 months since the singer Cassie accused Sean Combs in a lawsuit of sexual assault and years of physical abusefc188, the mogul’s once-booming music career has largely fallen apart.
His songs have vanished from radio playlists. He became a pariah at the Grammy Awards, where he once held court. And his business interests — including stakes in a media network and a popular liquor brand — have collapsed. At least 17 more lawsuits have been filed against Mr. Combs alleging misconduct, and last month, he was indicted in New York on federal charges including sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. He has pleaded not guilty and is appealing his detention in a Brooklyn jail.
But through it all, one part of Mr. Combs’s music business has remained steady, and even seen some growth: the popularity of his songs on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music.
Over the last year, as Mr. Combs, who is also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, faced a drumbeat of negative stories in the news media — like the raids on his homes by federal agents in March, and a leaked security camera video in May that showed him brutally assaulting Cassie in a hotel in 2016 — the number of people who follow him on Spotify has steadily grown. That figure has climbed from about 1.5 million late last year to 1.8 million now, an increase of about 15 percent, according to Chartmetric, which tracks data from streaming music and social media.
Recently the number of clicks for Mr. Combs’s songs have shot up dramatically. In the week before his arrest on Sept. 16, his catalog had about 3.2 million streams on services in the United States; in the weeks following, that figure rose about 50 percent to 4.8 million, according to Luminate, which supplies the data for Billboard’s charts. (In the most recent chart week, the number dipped a bit to 4.3 million.) On social media, Mr. Combs’s follower count has fluctuated, depending on the platform, but support on TikTok has been strong, where the hashtag #FreeDiddy has 12,000 uses.
In the music business, this has become a familiar phenomenon of the streaming era. A household-name star — like R. Kelly, Marilyn Manson or Michael Jackson — comes under harsh scrutiny over allegations of sexual misconduct, and may temporarily suffer in the broader cultural marketplace, but maintains steady streaming numbers.
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