This week, The Ringer explores how the “on demand” model has changed the way we consume TV, film, food, products, and, well, almost everything. Consumers have both adjusted to the streaming era and dictated how businesses operate in its wake. Our On-Demand Week stories grapple with how this shift came to be — and what it means for the future of tech, culture, and how we access both. Find all the stories here.
The year is 2020. The Antarctic ice shelf is on the verge of disintegration. Rapid job automation has doubled the unemployment rate. And Drake is the best-selling rapper of all time.
How did it come to this? Drake, who once rapped, “Got so many chains they call me Chaining Tatum,” has reached the commercial pinnacle of the last great American musical genre. Drake, who has a giant creepy tattoo of his uncle (or possibly Sonny Bono) on his back, has somehow sold more than his two forebears — Kanye West and Lil Wayne — combined. Drake, who is petty enough to argue with his mother over a tuna sandwich, is empirically better than your fave by the metrics celebrated in our capitalist society.
No one meant for this to happen. Who among us has even seen a Drake CD in the wild? But all those digital streams on Spotify and Apple Music added up; every embarrassingly earnest “Marvins Room” session, every mildly curious reassessment of “Best I Ever Had,” every drunken screeching of “Fake Love” brought us to this unthinkable moment. We are all complicit.
I thought Views was the beginning of the end for Aubrey Graham, a commercial apex coupled with a creative decline. I was wrong: More Life, Drake’s playlist/compilation/cabana soundtrack, set a new streaming record when it debuted in March. Then it reached a billion streams even faster than Views did. In the week ending April 27, More Life was streamed 97 million times in the United States. It’s already “sold” 1.4 million copies stateside, mostly through streams (the record industry equates 1,500 on-demand streams with an album sale). If it continues outpacing Views, the project will exceed 3 billion streams this year.
“It’s unbelievable the amount of volume that he gets, and it just keeps growing,” says Dave Bakula, Nielsen Music’s senior vice president for industry insights. “You don’t see a lot of artists that really stay right at the top of their game for as long as he has.”
More Life may not ultimately sell more than Views, which managed to move 1.6 million units in physical sales and digital downloads last year. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that Drake is far and away the most popular artist on streaming platforms, and streaming is the future of the music industry. If Drake continues to drop annual releases that ride the streaming explosion to new commercial heights, he will be the most successful rapper of all time by the end of the decade. “I looked at the growth of the industry between Views and More Life, and the growth of the industry really did kind of reflect the growth of Drake,” says Bakula. “It’s almost like all of this growth that was coming into streaming, when Drake’s album came out, they all went over there.”
Hip-hop has been the creative nerve center of the music industry for a long time; Drake is leading the charge in making it the commercial center again as well. The genre reached its platinum-album peak in the late ’90s (with the shiny suits to match), but was decimated by the rise of piracy in the 2000s. Today, though, platforms like Spotify and Apple Music allow all that digital consumption that’s been going on for two decades to finally be measured and monetized. Hip-hop never left, but now it’s back at the top of the (streaming) charts. And Drake stands to benefit most.
From nearly the beginning, hip-hop was a commercial force. In 1980, Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks” was the first rap single to go gold, indicating that it sold at least 500,000 units. Run-D.M.C.’s self-titled debut album was the first rap full-length to go gold in 1984, and their third LP, Raising Hell, was the first hip-hop album to be certified platinum, indicating a million units sold. Six months after Raising Hell, the Beastie Boys released Licensed to Ill, the first rap album to reach no. 1 on the Billboard charts.
Over the next decade, the number of mega-selling albums grew as hip-hop expanded its borders. N.W.A brought the West Coast into the platinum fold with 1988’s Straight Outta Compton, while Outkast opened the Southern front with 1994’s Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik. In 1998, as the record industry approached its commercial peak, 30 rap albums that would go platinum debuted, with artists ranging from Lauryn Hill to Juvenile to DMX releasing projects that would sell millions.
Sales became shorthand for credibility. On the West Coast, Dr. Dre refashioned himself as a kingmaker whose ability to set popular trends was its own artistic statement (“Give me one more platinum plaque, and fuck rap you can have it back”). In the East, Jay Z’s success on the charts was an extension of his hustle as a drug dealer, and later a bridge to his bona fides as a business executive (“I sold kilos of coke / I’m guessing I can sell CDs”). This synthesis of sales and art peaked with 50 Cent, whose commercial takeover of hip-hop was so assured that he bragged about selling like Eminem on his own breakout single. “The platinum status works metaphorically with other things that we associate with the late ’90s and early ’00s in terms of the excesses of hip-hop,” says Oliver Wang, a music writer and sociology professor at California State University, Long Beach. “The platinum plaque really fit in with the general ethos of everything being bigger — bigger sales, bigger rap videos, bigger braggadocio.”
That era more or less ended with 50 Cent. In the mid-2000s, as piracy continued to eat into album sales and the rise of iTunes led to an increased focus on singles, the notion of a culture-consuming rap album essentially died. Or, at least, we lost the ability to accurately measure when such an album arrived. The two biggest rappers of that era, and the ones who most clearly inspired Drake, are Kanye West and Lil Wayne. Go back and check the stats; Kanye’s first three albums sold 8 million units combined, when he was rattling off no. 1 singles at the peak of his popularity.
Lil Wayne’s sales are even more striking. From about 2005 to 2009, Wayne was culturally omnipresent. He claimed every major beat of the era as his own through his free internet mixtapes. He was featured so prominently on hit songs by Fat Joe and 2 Chainz (née Tity Boi of Playaz Circle) that no one remembers that those songs involve Fat Joe or 2 Chainz. He made a song about oral sex in which he sings like a mechanized frog thanks to Auto-Tune, and it was the biggest song of 2008.
None of this is apparent by reviewing album sales from the period. Wayne’s mixtapes existed in an era before on-demand streaming, and since they revolved around him blacking out on unlicensed tracks, they wouldn’t have been allowed on Spotify anyway. Tha Carter III, Wayne’s sixth official studio album, was supposed to be his financial reward for the gigabytes of free music he’d gifted us over the years. And in the summer of its oft-delayed release, it truly did feel, to quote Weezy from the LP, “colossal.” It’s the last album I recall that everyone in my social orbit, as well as all other overlapping orbits, obsessed over simultaneously. And yet I’m not sure I know of a single person who actually bought it.
Tha Carter III sold more than 1 million copies in its first week. In an era of industry-wide decline, the magnitude of that figure is captured perfectly in a scene of the unauthorized Lil Wayne documentary that followed the rapper as he achieved mega-celebrity. His manager, Cortez Bryant, is ecstatic when he learns about the sales numbers, and rushes to tell Wayne on his tour bus.
“Niggas go platinum every day,” Wayne says, feigning indifference. “Niggas don’t go platinum these days,” Bryant responds. “Period.” But in the latest accounting, the entire Tha Carter franchise has sold only 6.5 million copies in the United States — less than Vanilla Ice’s To the Extreme. Wayne arrived at the perfectly wrong time for the music industry to accurately measure his massive popularity.
At the height of his fame, Wayne cosigned a gawky young Canadian actor who could rap and sing. His protégé would go on to borrow Wayne’s flood-the-zone strategy by constantly having new music available at people’s fingertips. The difference was that by the time Drake reached Lil Wayne levels of ubiquity, the music industry had finally figured out how young people consume music.
At this point, it feels inevitable that Drake will become the best-selling rapper ever in the United States. Tallying up his first six solo commercial releases (he has variously called these projects EPs, albums, and mixtapes), he has been certified platinum 14.5 times. That means, even before More Life, Drake had already sold more than Kanye West, Lil Wayne, DMX, 50 Cent, and the Notorious B.I.G.
If Drake releases three more very successful albums, he could become the best-selling rapper. If he releases two wildly successful albums, he could become the best-selling rapper. I’ve done the math. But before I get into my projections, some notes about my methodology:
- All sales counts for older artists are using platinum and gold certifications issued by the Recording Industry Association of America.
- The RIAA records two unit sales for every sale of a double album, such as Outkast’s Speakerboxxx/The Love Below or Tupac’s All Eyez on Me. For the purposes of this project, I’ve halved those RIAA certifications.
- Compilations and collaboration albums are excluded (so no What a Time to Be Alive, no 8 Mile soundtrack, no Watch the Throne).
- These estimates hinge on the notion that Drake album streams will continue to grow at the same rate that More Life eclipsed Views in streams its first week, a rate of 57 percent.
- For simplicity’s sake I am ignoring physical sales and digital downloads. According to Nielsen, about 85 percent of Drake’s “sales” come from streaming in a typical week.
- 1,500 streams = one album sale, per the conversion metric used by Nielsen, Billboard, and the RIAA.
2017
The Plan: This part we already know. Drake released More Life on March 18 and smashed streaming records. The success of this new project, coupled with the impressive ongoing streaming performance of his catalog, is why I think Drake could eclipse all other rappers in sales sooner rather than later.
The Math: First let’s look at More Life. The album managed 385 million streams in its first week, with 57 percent more streams in that period than Views. Let’s assume it continues to outpace Views at this rate for the entire year. If we take Views’ 2016 total of about 3 billion streams and increase it by 57 percent, we get 4.77 billion streams for More Life.
But of course, Views is still streaming as well. The album has racked up close to half a billion streams already this year and is currently adding 23 million streams per week. Chances are its weekly streams will continue to taper off, but it’s very likely that the best-selling album of 2016 will add 1 billion additional streams this year.
Finally, we must consider Drake’s catalog sales, which are low-key the most impressive thing about his current dominance. Did you know that there were four Drake LPs among the 100 best-selling albums on the most recent Billboard chart, and a fifth (Nothing Was the Same) sat at 101? In terms of streams for the week ending April 27, Drake’s back catalog generated 32.6 million streams — 8.7 million for If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, 8 million for Nothing Was the Same, 10.7 million for Take Care, 3.2 million for Thank Me Later, and 2 million for So Far Gone.
Because all Drake music is equally accessible on streaming services, new albums do not automatically render old ones obsolete. Physical sales are typically split about 50–50 between current music and catalog albums, but on streaming the ratio is more like 70–30 for catalog work (and Drake’s ratio is even more lopsided), according to Bakula. “There’s no barrier to entry for these older albums,” he says. “There’s probably a lot of people right now that are discovering Drake that are going back and listening to his catalog, but to them it’s a brand-new release.”
I checked the performance of Take Care and Nothing Was the Same for the same week in April 2016 and found their numbers were similar (10 million and 9.8 million streams, respectively). My hunch is that all of Drake’s albums since Take Care, when he became a superstar, hover in the range of 8 million to 11 million streams per week. If we extrapolate the 2017 figures across the entire year, we get 1.7 billion streams for the year.
Drake’s Total 2017 Streaming Sales (Projected): 7.47 billion streams (5 million album units)
Drake’s Career Album Sales (Projected): 19.5 million units
Artists Now Officially Less Important Than Drake: Outkast, Tupac, Will Smith, MC Hammer
And now for the hypothetical future.
2018
The Plan: Drake releases a new project called No, My Name Is AUBREY in April. Each song is named after one of his former romantic interests (partial track listing: “Aaliyah,” “Robyn,” “Serena,” “Jennifer,” “Taylor,” “Courtney From Hooters on Peachtree”). This is not an album, Drake insists. It’s an “aural-erotic poem about the nature of love.”
The Math: AUBREY, getting the same bump that More Life did thanks to streaming growth, pulls in 7.49 billion streams in its first year. More Life performs even better than Views did in its second year, generating 1.57 billion streams. Let’s assume that Drake’s older back catalog simply remains stable, but Views also begins performing like those albums, racking up 9 million streams per week. That’s 2.16 billion streams in a year.
Drake’s 2018 Streaming Sales: 11.22 billion streams (7.48 million albums)
Drake’s Career Album Sales: 27 million units
Artists Now Officially Less Important Than Drake: Nelly, Jay Z, Beastie Boys
2019
The Plan: During a sojourn to Jamaica modeled after Kanye’s famous My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sessions in Hawaii, Drake records All Da Riddims, a genre-bending opus in which each track appropriates a different dialect from the African diaspora. This is not an album, Drake insists. It’s a “global virtual dancehall DJ set.”
The Math: With streaming still growing at a breakneck pace, All Da Riddims sets yet another record, generating 11.8 billion streams. AUBREY also does better than past Drake albums in its second year and gets 2.46 billion streams. Meanwhile, Drake’s catalog, which now also includes 9 million weekly streams of More Life, nets 2.63 billion streams for the year.
Drake’s 2018 Streaming Sales: 16.89 billion streams (11.26 million albums)
Drake’s Career Album Sales: 38.26 million units
Artists Now Officially Less Important Than Drake: Eminem
These projections are obviously a bit generous — maybe Drake’s streams won’t continue to grow at this rapid pace, or perhaps we’ll tire of his millennial moping. But let’s push this projection out just one more year to show the incredible amount of runway Drake has to dominate this genre in a way it’s never been dominated before, just through streaming.
2020
The Plan: Drake has finally eclipsed Eminem in sales, satisfying a grudge he’s harbored ever since he was at a frat party where everyone preferred Em’s verse on “Forever” to his. But he wants to put himself on a commercial plane no other hip-hop artist will ever reach. He announces that he is retiring from music after the release of The Drakeover. It’s modeled after The Black Album, but instead of working with every star producer of the moment, he teams up on with the 10 hottest current rappers under the age of 25. This is not an album, Drake insists. It’s a “vampiric audiobook produced by 40.”
The Math: Physical media is essentially dead, and the 18.5 billion streams of The Drakeover helped to bury it. All Da Riddims rides another annoying “postracial society” wave to 3.86 billion streams. Instead of texting or using Snapchat, those crazy teens now communicate using snippets of old Drake songs. His catalog earns 3.1 billion streams.
Drake’s 2018 Streaming Sales: 25.46 billion streams (16.97 million albums)
Drake’s Career Album Sales: 55.23 million units
Artists Now Officially Less Important Than Drake: God
Let’s say my predictions come to pass and Drake becomes the best-“selling” rapper ever. Will he have earned it? Buying an album used to require effort. To get The College Dropout in 2004, I had to do whatever 14-year-olds do to acquire money, persuade my mom to drive me to the mall, walk to the Sam Goody store, have a public argument about whether I had to get the Parental Advisory version, angrily grab the Parental Advisory version, and interact with a human to exchange funds for the disc at the cash register. To listen to Drake, I just have to be mildly bored while surfing Facebook and click a couple of buttons on my computer or phone. I still remember what it felt like to hear “We Don’t Care” blasting from the speakers of my mom’s aging Kia on the drive home from the mall, but I have no idea what I was doing the first time I streamed More Life.
But I still listened to it — a lot — and that’s all that matters. Drake is impossible to resist when he’s just a few clicks away because he has an ear (and a voice) for addictive melodies and just enough surface-level vulnerability to feel extremely relatable. He is an avatar for our own melancholy, or exuberance, or sneering arrogance, and so we stream him when we want to enhance these feelings. He rarely mythologizes his own past outside of broad dweeby-to-debonair terms; go see him in concert and you’ll probably notice that he doesn’t play any of his music before Take Care. More recently, as he’s tried on new cultural stylings like Cinco de Mayo sombreros, his specific personality has become even more anonymous. Drake’s lame origin story was weighing him down, so he discarded it. The only version of Drake that matters is the one that’s currently in heavy rotation on Spotify.
These aspects of Drake make him the perfect artist to dominate the on-demand era. You don’t need to like Drake as a person to enjoy his music, like Kanye. You don’t need to decipher Drake’s metaphors to appreciate his songs, like Kendrick. You don’t need to spend money on his superfluous streaming service to access his albums, like Jay Z. He probably has fewer die-hard fans than any of these artists — just thinking about ranking the Drake albums makes me sleepy — but he has a legion of casual ones. On Spotify alone, Drake has more than 40 million monthly listeners, the third most of any artist in the world. It’s hard to be a Drake obsessive, but it’s just as hard to be totally sick of him.
Does that make him unworthy of the sales crown? No, says Bakula. “Maybe [streaming] is not the same as if I’d gone out and bought the album, but mentally it does get you engaged with the artist just as much and allows you to dive in even deeper than you would have before,” he says. “The discovery aspect of it just trumps everything.”
Drake has tailored his career to the streaming environment. He allied himself with Apple Music, where his songs over-index even more than on other services. He spins off hit singles at will, then slots the most successful ones onto his official LPs, which boosts the albums’ unit sales (try to explain to me how “Hotline Bling” fits into the creative vision of Views). And he stuffs 20-plus tracks into his projects, generating more money for himself in royalties and more buzz when his meandering albums smash streaming records. You can almost imagine him specifically engineering tracks that will land on the RapCaviar, Today’s Top Hits, and Are & Be playlists on Spotify.
If or when Drake becomes the best-selling rapper, I doubt people will take much notice. It was rappers themselves that set up the platinum plaque as a status symbol by bragging about it in their lyrics. But today’s artists, including Drake, rarely use sales numbers as a boast (except Nicki Minaj, who is happy to remind you about her albums’ platinum status). “I don’t know if numbers really matter anymore,” says Wang. “Streaming does not exist within our imagination in the same way that album sales did. The fact that you have 10 million YouTube views, I don’t think people know what that means in the same way that they understood a million units sold.”
Drake’s commercial reign will likely remain unchallenged, but it’s come at a time when sales have never been less important for affording superstar status. Sentient meme Lil Yachty doesn’t have an official album or even a hit song, really, but he’s already been in commercials with LeBron James and Carly Rae Jepsen. Kanye West locked his last album behind a Tidal paywall, rendering discussions of its sales moot before they could even begin. Artists today are more interested in capturing moments than plaques — they’re scrambling for attention just like the rest of us. The lyrics that best capture the modern version of the sales flex that was so common in ’90s are probably from Nicki (“50K for a verse, no album out”) and Beyoncé (“Know where you was when that digital popped / I stopped the world”).
Drake, too, is a master of generating attention at will, leveraging any and all digital platforms to keep his audience just interested enough to keep streaming. His place near the top of the sales pantheon is all but guaranteed, but how we’ll look back on all this time we spent with him remains to be seen. “Whether Drake is the best selling or not is secondary to other factors,” says Wang. “Is there a critical mass of people who think that he was enormously talented, that he was enormously influential? I think those are the kind of amorphous criteria by which in hindsight we evaluate people. … That GOAT status has never been primarily based around sales numbers.”