The Pop Out: Ken & Friends was a one-off concert by Kendrick Lamar, the Grammy award-winning rapper and songwriter. He announced the concert two weeks before the event, and after a massive wave of fans searching for tickets, Amazon Music stepped up to livestream it on both Twitch and their own Prime Video platform. It became one of AmazonMusic’s most popular streams ever on Twitch, with over 186,000 fans tuned in at its peak.
The Pop Out - Ken and Friends Viewership Statistics
The concert was live for just over four hours, and the Twitch broadcast held an average viewership of 108.5K concurrent viewers. Viewership slowly built up throughout the event, with the concert’s impromptu nature meaning it was perhaps not as well advertised as it could have been. As the stream went on, more and more viewers found the broadcast and started watching.
The peak viewership for the broadcast came towards the end of the stream, with 187K PV recorded. According to Streams Charts analytics for this stream, our Estimated Audience for the event is 432.6K individual Twitch users. In total, the stream recorded 461.3K Hours Watched.
Not only were so many viewers tuned into the event, but many were actively participating with Twitch Chat and enjoying the event entirely through the livestreaming platform. In just over four hours, the AmazonMusic Twitch Chat posted over 164.4K total messages or 645 messages per minute on average.
The Pop Out - Ken and Friends Twitch Chat Analytics
These 164.4K total messages were posted by 22.4K Active Chatters recorded for the broadcast, with each Chatter posting 7.3 messages on average. The most popular messages from the Chat were all Twitch Chat emotes, with fans either DinoDancing through the event or highlighting the fire rap songs.
The Pop Out: Ken and Friends came shortly after Kendrick Lamar’s rap beef with another prominent songwriter and rapper, Drake. It went viral, and Lamar used this concert to play some of his diss tracks to a wide live audience. After playing four of his five total diss tracks, and track Not Like Us five times in a row, Twitch Chat and the broadcast viewers only continued to grow in size.
Most popular AmazonMusic Twitch streams
| Date | Broadcast | Peak Viewership |
|---|---|---|
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10 Dec 2021 |
239 825 |
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23 Feb 2022 |
200 654 |
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19 Jun 2024 |
186 955 |
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07 Jan 2022 |
175 030 |
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08 Jul 2021 |
119 070 |
The concert represents a triumph for Kendrick Lamar and more than 20 other artists involved with the event. The broadcast emerged as one of AmazonMusic’s most popular events ever. Although we can not track viewership data for Prime Video, Amazon Music revealed on LinkedIn that the event was their most-watched Amazon Music production ever.
Lamar and Drake’s beef extended into the livestreaming industry too. Drake took to Trainwreck’s Kick Chat on June 30 to insinuate that Spotify had artificially boosted the viewership for “that one song from that one guy”. The consensus among fans is that this was likely aimed at Kendrick Lamar and his track “Not Like Us”, but after breaking Amazon Music records, any question regarding Lamar’s genuine popularity has been answere.
