Blog: Drake

Read our latest daily deep dives, hot takes, and exciting updates about the entertainment world. Check out the latest insight from your favourite analyst, or search by coverage areas - music, entertainment and fandom, creator economy and social.

Will more artists release full songs to social media in 2025?

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Tatiana Cirisano
It is now a standard part of most music rollouts to release a clip of the song on social video platforms before it hits streaming. This makes sense when you think of social media as a marketing tool. But as social video has ascended (and arguably become more about entertainment than connecting socially), apps like TikTok are now quasi-consumption platforms in their own right.
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Another Fake Drake? AI is decoupling artists and their voices (and there’s no coming back)

Cover image for Another Fake Drake? AI is decoupling artists and their voices (and there’s no coming back)
Hanna Kahlert
Drake has had perhaps one of the most publicly up-and-down relationships with generative AI. There was the AI Drake music generator, which he was dead set against. Then there was ‘Heart on My Sleeve’, the AI-generated mix using the voices of Drake and The Weeknd by a creator known as ghostwriter, where Drake again expressed displeasure at the use of his voice.
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Kendrick vs. Drake is a rare ‘mainstream’ moment — and streaming is on the sidelines

Cover image for Kendrick vs. Drake is a rare ‘mainstream’ moment — and streaming is on the sidelines
Tatiana Cirisano
Over the last week, it has been hard to go anywhere, or speak to anyone, without some mention of the epic diss track battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. When is the last time we could say that about a pop culture moment? The domination of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour is arguably the only bit of music news in the last year that managed to cut across every niche and break into “mainstream” conversation.
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AI will transform music; the question is how?

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Mark Mulligan
Every new technology goes through a period of being overhyped before the dust settles, and that technology either fades or builds steadily thereafter. Think 3D printing, VR, NFTs. In my 20+ years as a media and tech analyst, only three technologies have had a level of hype that felt like it was going to live up to expectations: 1) the internet (which was already in full swing by the time I started out – I’m not that old); 2) smartphones / apps; and 3) AI.
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Music is not a level playing field — it is a field of all levels

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Tatiana Cirisano
We have heard it (and said it) many times before: the music industry has never been as competitive as it is today. But the challenge is not just that today’s landscape is ultra-competitive, it is also that new artists chasing success are competing against artists who came up before the landscape became so fragmented , as well as the entire history of music — not just that which is new.
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Ellie Goulding and Billie Eilish Are Streaming’s New Normal

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Mark Mulligan
Less than a week into the new decade and we already have the first indications that the streaming rulebook continues to be rewritten faster than the ink can dry on its last entry. Three separate articles, on the surface unrelated, when stitched together create the outline of a new streaming narrative that while firmly rooted in recent developments represents an entirely new chapter for the music industry: Ellie Goulding’s ‘River’ was the UK Christmas number one despite being an Amazon exclusive Jimmy Iovine claims Drake and Billie Eilish each have more streams than the entirety of the 1980s UK streaming revenue growth slowed, adding £191 million in 2019 compared to £210 million in 2019 Fusing consumption and retail Streaming’s impact is both commercial and cultural, in large part because it fuses what used to be retail and radio.
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Seven Developments in Recorded Music in the 2010s (and the Songs that Defined them)

Zach Fuller
Decade retrospectives are almost doomed to fail. Assess the 60s in 1969 and you would have likely overweighed the influence of Grand Funk Railroad compared to The Velvet Underground. When it comes to the 70s, proto Hip-Hop pioneers such as Grandmaster Flash or the Post-Punk of Joy Division would have been a mere footnote in favour of David Naughton or Melissa Manchester.
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Songwriters Aren’t Getting Paid Enough and Here’s Why

Mark Mulligan
Music Business Worldwide recently ran a story on how Apple has proposed a standard streaming rate for songwriters, with Google and Spotify apparently resistant. Of course, Apple can afford to run Apple Music at a loss and has a strategic imperative for making it more difficult for Spotify to be profitable, so do not assume that Apple’s intentions here are wholly altruistic.
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‘Nice for What?’ and the Slow Death of the Album

Zach Fuller
I write this week’s blog conflicted between the music fan who grew up on the album and the MIDiA analyst looking at the numbers (an eternal struggle). Alongside the feature-length film, the LP was one of the definitive artistic mediums to emerge in the 20th century, but it was also bound to the same business framework of many enterprises of the period; factory-powered mass production methods with the product demand side stoked by television and radio.
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Welcome To The Post-DIY Era

Mark Mulligan
I recently took part in the True Music Forum in Madrid, an event organized by Boiler Room. I was on a panel that explored whether DIY is now coming of age with a host of high profile artists, most of them urban artists, bypassing or twisting the traditional label model and still achieving stand-out success.
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