From releasing his third mixtape So Far Gone as a free download in 2009 to his $19 million partnership with Apple in 2015, Drake has shaped digital music trends rather than followed them. The 30-year-old Canadian rapper's rise to being one of the music industry's biggest global acts has been a decade in the making: Aubrey Drake Graham emerged at a time when music sales were in freefall, but his combination of creative control and commercial autonomy has helped him to capitalise on the industry's music-streaming-fuelled rebound. Despite his association with Apple Music - a combination of promotion and exclusivity - Drake's career has been more intertwined with its biggest rival. As he was releasing his first mixtape in 2006, a pair of Swedes were co-founding Spotify in Stockholm - although it would take two further years to launch it. Read more: How Spotify chooses what makes it onto your Discover Weekly playlist
Since then, Drake and Spotify have grown in lockstep - Spotify now has more than 100 million listeners, and more than a third of them are listening to Drake. The Canadian is currently the most popular artist on the service with 36.5 million monthly listeners and 8.4 billion lifetime streams. His latest album Views has been streamed more than three billion times on Spotify alone. Drake has startling numbers on every digital platform: 34.2 million Twitter followers; 35.6 million Facebook fans; 29.6 million Instagram followers; and 6.6 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, where the video for "Hotline Bling" has just passed a billion views. That video was paid for by Apple, as part of a partnership that has seen Drake promote Apple Music at its launch event in June 2015, host his own OVO Sound Radio show on its Beats 1 radio station and grant Apple a fortnight's exclusive on Views from late April that yielded a million sales in its first week.
"Drake's deal with Apple is groundbreaking and reflects the way in which superstar talent, especially those with more control over their careers and copyrights, can exercise greater decision-making power," says Mark Mulligan of music-industry consultancy firm MIDiA Research. "What Apple is doing with deals such as Drake's is becoming the Medici of the streaming-era music business: patrons of the musical arts. Drake saw this opportunity and, knowing all too well that straightforward recorded music incomes are challenged, saw this as a way of combining massive marketing reach and support with guaranteed revenue." "As the industry continues to evolve, more services provided by the old music-industry guard become commodities and artists develop deeper relationships with their fans that they own," says Bryan Calhoun, a digital media strategist who works with artists including Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj and The Roots. "This will inevitably lead to artists having greater control. They will not assign rights to companies that don't give them the flexibility to do what they want when they want." Like all the best music entrepreneurs, Drake is creatively restless: forging links with UK grime label Boy Better Know and collaborating with Streatham rapper Dave, all while searching for new talent for his label OVO Sound. He will soon release More Life, a collection of new tracks described as a "playlist" rather than an album. Not content with reworking the power dynamics between artists and technology, streaming's biggest star is now reshaping formats.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
