RiRi may not be promoting an album in 2018 — her long-gestating eighth LP, ANTI, dropped back in 2016 — but that hasn’t stopped her from setting new musical records. This week, on International Women’s Day, the 30-year-old became the first female artist to ever surpass two billion streams on Apple Music.
The platform revealed their Top 20 women in streaming on Thursday, with Taylor Swift, Beyonce, Ariana Grande, and Adele rounding out the top five with the eight time Grammy winner. Newcomer SZA cracked the top ten, as did Selena Gomez, Sia, Lana Del Rey, and Lady Gaga.
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Rihanna has kept a packed schedule in the months since her last ANTI tour stop wrapped. Last autumn, she launched her cult-following adored Fenty Beauty line, and now she’s eyeing another FENTYxPUMA outing and maybe even a lingerie collection.
Most notably, though, Rihanna has emerged in recent years as one of the music world’s most outspoken and convincing activists, her attention spread across large swathes of global concerns. Fenty has been applauded for its inclusive approach to skin tone by offering 40 shades for users to pick from — unheard of in the commercial market. She also funded an oncology and nuclear medicine centre in her native Barbados to help combat breast cancer and she founded the Clara Lionel Foundation, which works to send youth from the Caribbean to college in the United States via a scholarship programme. And if you visit her Twitter feed, you’ll quickly grasp how invested she is in her work with the Global Partnership for Education, which works to improve education in impoverished countries.
Need more proof? Even Harvard agrees — they named her their Humanitarian of the Year in 2017. You go, RiRi!
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