Credit
Article. Seongdeok Seo(Music Critic)
Design. Yurim Jeon

It’s no exaggeration to say that Drake has been dominating the charts in the streaming age, and we need look no further than two achievements in particular to see his impact on them. First, 2018’s Scorpion: The album sat atop the Billboard 200 for five consecutive weeks, three of its tracks took first on the Hot 100, and seven reached the top 10. In the end, all 25 tracks from the album made their way onto the chart. Second, Drake once went 431 weeks, from May 2009 until August 2017, without ever dipping out of the Hot 100 once.

 

Drake has also been featured on a significant number of hits and put out a number of successful smaller releases like EPs even since Scorpion. Nevertheless, all eyes were on how well his sixth studio album, Certified Lover Boy, would perform upon release. The streaming strategy Drake pioneered when it comes to albums is already widely known through the hip hop scene and it has since evolved further, so is Drake still able to assert his dominance in the field of streaming?

 

And there’s an even juicier aspect to this question. Certified was originally scheduled for a January release but was pushed back to summer after the artist sustained an injury. A conflict arose between him and Kanye West in the meanwhile. The popular theory goes that Kanye’s latest album, Donda, was repeatedly postponed in order to match up with Drake’s. Whether by coincidence or by design, Donda was released just five days ahead of Certified. It’s hard to ignore the fact that billboards in downtown Toronto were being monopolized by Donda promotions during the week Certified was released.

 

So who won? It’s difficult to judge the match between Drake and Kanye. Donda did come out a week earlier, but it was released on a Sunday, meaning it lost out on the first two days, since figures are tallied from Friday through Thursday. This makes it challenging to compare the first-week performance of the two albums side-by-side. But Drake is still Drake, and one thing is certain: He didn’t lose out to his past self. Certified broke the single-day streaming record on both Spotify and Apple Music; the previous record holder, unsurprisingly, was Drake’s own Scorpion. Three tracks off Certified—“Girls Want Girls” (feat. Lil Baby), “Champagne Poetry” and “Fair Trade” (feat. Travis Scott)—became the top three songs ever by number of plays within a 24-hour period.

 

On September 18, Certified debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with 743.7 million streams—equal to 560,000 album units. Scorpion had 745.9 million streams, which is slightly higher, but considering that it had 25 tracks to Certified’s 21, the new album arguably achieved its record with more efficiency. Altogether, Certified reached the equivalent of 610,000 copies; the only artists to pull off such a high volume have been Taylor Swift and Drake himself.

 

Whether Certified will be able to dominate the charts for a long time the way Scorpion did is difficult to say. While Scorpion rode on the promotional boost from the singles issued leading up to its release, Certified was put out all in one go. How this difference will affect the album’s performance over the coming weeks remains to be seen. One’s influence isn’t determined by performance figures alone; whether his latest strategy will prove to be a successful escapade and a standard in the marketplace is a different story.