Sean Combs’s legal woes are growing. So are his streaming numbers

In the 11 months since the singer Cassie accused Sean Combs in a lawsuit of sexual assault and years of physical abuse, 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 alcohol brand – have collapsed. At least 17 more lawsuits have been filed against 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 Combs’s music business has remained steady, and even seen some growth: the popularity of his songs on streaming services such as Spotify and Apple Music.
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Over the last year, as Combs, who is also known as Diddy and Puff Daddy, faced a drumbeat of negative stories in the news media – such as the raids on his homes by federal agents in March, and a leaked security camera video in May – 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 per cent, according to Chartmetric, which tracks data from streaming music and social media.
Recently the number of clicks for Combs’s songs have shot up dramatically. In the week before his arrest on September 16th, his catalogue had about 3.2 million streams on services in the United States; in the weeks following, that figure rose about 50 per cent 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, 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.
George Howard, a professor at the Berklee College of Music, sees this as partly a function of curiosity, as casual listeners refresh their memories about an artist’s work or do their own homework in trying to understand the news. Clicking on a track is an easy – and free – way to do that.
“If [record shops] were still around, we would not see people walking in there and paying for a CD to satiate that curiosity,” Howard said. “But there’s an anonymity with streaming. It’s the same human impulse as looking at a car wreck.”
Nostalgia or headline-driven interest may account for the recent bump in Combs’s streaming numbers. But they can’t explain the continued popularity of Kelly, who in 2022 and 2023 was sentenced to more than 30 years in prison for child sex crimes, sex trafficking and racketeering.
For decades, Kelly (54) was trailed by allegations that he had sexually abused minors even as he developed a deep catalogue of beloved R&B hits like “Ignition (Remix)” and “I Believe I Can Fly.” His career began to unravel after a 2019 television documentary, “Surviving R Kelly,” which featured detailed, stomach-turning first-person accounts from his victims.
Yet ever since that documentary aired, Kelly’s streams have been on a steady upward trajectory, according to data from Luminate. That pattern remained unchanged throughout Kelly’s trials, and has continued, well after his news cycle has died down.
Bill Werde, director of the Bandier music business program at Syracuse University, said that for artists at the level of Kelly or Combs, who had enjoyed enormous fame for decades, “they are always going to have a certain percentage of diehard fans who will follow them no matter what.”
Those fans may be defiant supporters of their idols, or simply indifferent listeners who are unwilling to give up their attachment to favoured tracks. According to Chartmetric, Kelly’s songs appear on 370,000 playlists on Spotify, virtually all of them created and maintained by individual fans; Kelly appears on only about 200 official playlists from Spotify, many of them involving other artists.
Whether Combs’ streaming activity maintains its current momentum may depend in part on that news cycle that will surround his federal trial, which is scheduled to begin in May. But despite some streaming popularity, Werde said, the larger pool of business is dead for Combs and Kelly.
“No brand wants to use an R Kelly or Diddy song in their commercial,” Werde said. “It’s a revenue black hole. The only thing you can count on is the streams, and with Diddy, the question becomes where do these numbers settle.” – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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