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Many artists would dream to hit 10 million streams on Spotify with a unique song. Drake did it with more than 400 tracks.
His productivity is insane, and the way he manages to be successful with everything he releases is just as amazing. We review his one of a kind numbers.
The Big Picture: Drake's Career
After having spent his younger years acting in the Canadian TV series Degrassi, Drake jumped into the typical route, that many rapper do.
He began independently releasing mixtapes, an EP and then ultimately signing with a major label, which happened in 2009, after the success of his mixtape So Far Gone earlier that year.
The Canadian artist is well known for being basketball team Toronto Raptors, number one fan. Ironically, Drake followed exactly the same path as the former star of the team, DeMar DeRozan.
A mere four days before signing for the Young Money label, owned by Lil Wayne, DeMar DeRozan was drafted by the Raptors. In the same way that DeRozan became big inside the NBA in 2010, going from 8 to 17 points per game, Drake went from a Gold EP in the US, to his first Platinum album Thank Me Later, in 2010.
From 2011 to 2015 DeRozan kept growing slowly until reaching All-Star status. From 2011 to 2015, the success of Drake remained consistent too.
At the start of the 2016 season, the Toronto shooting Guard stepped up strongly, with a 34 point average over the first 7 games. This was also the year of Drake's definitive breakthrough, with his Views album adding a new dimension to his career, by breaking out on a worldwide scale.
Since then, he kept releasing material, no less than 7 albums and tons of stand-alone hits plus features, so much that it gets difficult to get a clear view of his relevance.
What we believe to be true about an artist success, is not always translated into numbers too. While we have PER – Player Efficiency Rating – for basketball players, we had no valid indicator to accurately rate music stars.
That was until, we here at ChartMasters introduced to you the Commensurate Sales to Popularity Concept! We'll now apply it to the subject of today, Drake!
Drake Album Sales
Updated Studio Album Sales & Comments
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At nearly 15.5 million units sold across five studio albums, one playlist and four mixtapes, that we will be considering as valid albums as per their length, sales of Drake studio albums aren’t the most impressive we've met so far.
Maybe even more negative is how Views is far from being utterly bigger than his past albums, in fact it sold even easily less than Take Care and the same amount of copies than both Thank Me Later and Nothing Was the Same.
In the same line, Scorpion sold significantly less than Views, while all projects since Dark Lane Demo Tapes are selling next to nothing.
Most of the releases since More Life got no physical release at all though, which shows the artist and his label are betting their money elsewhere.
In fact, our CSPC analysis made us understand that we may not jump into conclusions too fast.
To judge Drake's album sales, one needs to consider he sold almost exclusively in North America up to Views. A pure urban artist, he managed to cross over the general audience thanks to this effort that opened him the door of many countries he hadn't explore before.
Selling routinely 2,5 million units of his studio LPs to this restricted audience is already way more impressive. His mixtapes sales are just superb since this format is usually fully ignored by the public.
If results viewed that way are great, it is still not the main fort of Drake as we are going to see below.
Drake songs sales
Below, we list down results from the artist through physical sales, digital sales and streaming.
Please be aware that when the artist is regarded as the lead act, he is rewarded with 100% of these units, while featured acts share among them a 50% piece of the totals.
Physical singles
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As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 3 ratio between one album and one physical single.
As many of you may expect, Drake never stepped into the physical singles market, hardly selling anything in this format.
By his debut in 2009, the US market was dead for 7 years. Now that he broke German or French markets in 2016, the physical market has been dead there for some years too.
As for most artist a few collectors came out still with mostly irrelevant numbers.
Digital songs
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As a reminder, the weighting is done with a 10 to 1,5 ratio between one album and one digital single.
From 2009 to 2011, Drake had no global hit. His success in the US was undoubtable though and moderate to great hits got accumulated at an incredible speed.
His breakthrough hit was Best I Ever Had, which back then also enjoyed a decent ringtones market. It's up to over 5 million sales to date.
Then, his first two LPs generated a total of 10 distinct million selling songs and all their album tracks did well too.
The Motto and Take Care are past 4 million sales, while Over, Find Your Love and Headlines are around 3 million a piece.
Take Care album is home for total download sales north of 20 million singles, worth 3 million equivalent album sales.
This intermediate period wasn't well structured around one specific album.
By 2013, Drake had already understood that the concept of the album itself was dying. As a result, he started dropping mixtapes at fast pace, plus tons of collaborations that are listed as orphan songs or features.
Hold On, We’re Going Home is the biggest hit of that period extracted from those studio albums, it moved 4.6 million units.
Both 2015 mixtapes got good hits in the US but with more modest numbers elsewhere. The strongest was Jumpman at 1.7 million.
In 2016, the singer exploded globally thanks to songs Hotline Bling and One Dance. It may come as a surprise to see that they only sold 4 million units each.
The collapse of downloads in favor to streams limited their impact.
In the same vain, God's Plan has been a monster #1 smash in many places, but downloads were ever weaker by 2018. It's up to 1.8 million. Both Nice for What and In My Feelings were huge hits as well.
As previously mentioned, Drake issued tons of stand alone tracks while also featuring on many hits.
Forever, Bedrock and What's My Name sold over 6 million each. Work, F**kin' Problems, Right Above It and Moment 4 Life all top 3 million.
On top of that, 16 more orphan and featured songs are million sellers.
It reflects something crucial here, more than sales of a unique track, the key element is the unreal volume of Drake's catalog. It may seem easy to participate in hundreds of songs, but to do it without losing momentum is insane.
At the end of the day, the Canadian superstar has sold a tremendous total of 172 million units of downloads and ringtones.
This figure may seem unbelievable considering his top singles are around 6 million units. As mentioned, his consistency and his activity over many years have been unmatched.
In fact, Drake is already and far and away the artist with the most entries in the US Hot 100 Singes Chart. He took that incredible distinction when he reached 126 charting hits in August 2016 – a mere seven years after his debut. He went on to increase this record to 321 charting hits so far.
Streaming
Streaming is made up of audio and video streams. Our CSPC methodology now includes both to better reflect the real popularity of each track. The main source of data for each avenue is respectively Spotify and YouTube.
To factor in the growing impact of multiple Asian countries where these platforms aren’t always the go-to site for music streaming, more sources have been added.
In order to account for their real popularity in each relevant country, the below sources have been used along with the mentioned ratios that reflect the market share of each area.
Audio Streams
– South Korea: Genie streams * 2.20 (consistent with Gaon streaming numbers)
– Japan: AWA streams * 100 / 4 (AWA has 4% of the Japanese streaming market)
– Arabic world: Anghami streams
– Sub-Saharan Africa: Boomplay + Audiomack streams
– Elsewhere: Spotify streams * Spotify market shares based on artists' market distribution
Video Streams
– China* : QQ video streams * 50 if the song is available for audio stream, QQ video streams * 5 elseway (scale built based on known figures for several major artists)
– Elsewhere : Youtube views increased by 10% to account for various local platforms
*since Chinese streaming platforms are mostly video streaming platforms, their streams are weighted on par with YouTube streams.
Audio Stream value – 1,500 plays equal 1 album unit
Video Stream value – 6,750 views equal 1 album unit
Equivalent Albums Sales (EAS) = ( Spotify * ArtistRatio + Genie * 2.20 + AWA * 100 / 4 + Anghami + Boomplay + Audiomack ) / 1500 + ( QQ views* 50(or 5) + YouTube * 1.1 ) / 6750
Top Hits
To make it simple, each of these 40 songs would be the signature song of most artists. The streaming success of Drake is out of this world.
One Dance, blocked for long on YouTube, is now over 2.8 billion Spotify streams. It's one of the rare songs which has been the most streamed of all-time on the platform at some point, it has since been dislodged by Ed Sheeran's Shape of You which was itself topped by The Weeknd's Blinding Lights.
God's Plan is ever closer, itself over 2 million EAS from streams. This one enjoyed a full availablility on YouTube where it recorded over 2 billion views.
Several features are very strong in spite of being downgraded, they include Sicko Mode led by Travis Scott, Work by Rihanna, Bad Bunny's MIA, and Future hit Life Is Good.
In My feelings, Hotline Bling, Nice For What and Passionfruit are also phenomenal performers, each with more than 1.6 million EAS.
While Dark Lane Demo Tapes was supposed to be a minor mixtape, the 2020 track Toosie Slide posts incredible numbers as well with 1 billion streams on Spotify. It proved that the artist strength remains huge.
More recent tracks make this stacked top 40, including 3 from Certified Lover Boy, while Jimmy Cooks and Rich Flex are climbing fast.
The hip-hop icon has massive tracks from all his releases, and no matter if he pairs with Lil Wayne, Future, Rihanna, DJ Khaled, Meek Mill, Chris Brown, etc., he smashes.
The most stunning results may be totals as Drake now claims over 90 billion streams on Spotify, near 55 billion on YouTube and 105 million equivalent album sales from streams.
Full catalog breakdown
If you are familiar with the artist's catalog and want to check details of each and every song, you can access to all of them right here.
Keep yourself up to date
Our website provides you a fantastic tool which fetches updated Spotify streams as you request them, use it to watch these results grow day after day!
Want to compare Drake's songs with other top hits?
Drake compilations sales
Compilations sales figures listing
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Full Length related records Sales – Summary
As most of Drake EPs and mixtapes are made of tracks unreleased in his studio albums, their sales are mainly allocated to the orphan folder.
Total Album (all types) Sales per Country
Please note that some of the countries totals may be slightly incomplete when the figure is N/A for minor releases.
Drake Career CSPC Results
So, after checking all the figures, how many overall equivalent album sales has each Drake album achieved? Well, at this point we hardly need to add up all of the figures defined in this article!
Albums CSPC results
[xyz-ips snippet="updatedCSPCalbums"]
This is it ! If pure album sales aren’t enough to validate the fact that Views is Drake biggest album to date, this turns out to be very clear after adding in all pieces of the jigsaw. Closing in 17 million, the album is one of the biggest releases in recent years.
Scorpion has been a tremendous beast as well, now at 14.6 million, just like Take Care, which stands at 12.6 million.
Both albums Nothing Was the Same and More Life are now virtually at 10 million too.
Starting from the former, Drake scored 5 consecutive albums with 10 million sales or more once we exclude mixtapes and collaborative albums.
While his discography has been impressively consistent, Certified Lover Boy felt like a lackluster album. It kept amassing streams though, already claiming over 6 million units.
Both Her Loss (3.5 million) and For All the Dogs register good numbers considering how recent they still are.
In some months, once the latter grow while weaker performer Honestly, Nevermind climbs, each of his 14 projects will be over 2.5 million sales.
His total from orphan songs is massive too at almost 18 million. Then, features combine for an even bigger 22 million. Getting Drake on a track is like striking gold.
Out of all sales figures, the most oustanding one is that Drake has now sold over 140 million equivalent album units through all formats.
How much is he increasing? He scores organically 30 million Spotify streams per day with his lead songs alone. With features, this equals to well over 300,000 album sales every week thanks to streams alone.
Singles CSPC results
The list is compiled in album equivalent sales generated by each song. Therefore, these figures are not merged units of singles formats. Instead, it includes the weighted sales of the song's physical single, download, ringtone and streaming. Also included is its share among sales of all albums on which it is featured.
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Discography results
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Records & Achievements
- Drake is the most streamed artist ever on Spotify with 88.3 billion streams, including 67.4 billion lead.
- Drake has the most ever lead songs over 100 million streams on Spotify with 171.
- With 10.2 million albums sold in the US in the 10s, Drake is the second best selling male artist of the decade behind Justin Bieber.
- At 16,615,000 EAS, Views is the 2nd most successful album from 2016.
- At 14,608,000 EAS, Scorpion is the 3rd most successful album from 2018.
- At 244 million, Drake is the highest certified artist ever in the US for digital singles.
- At 321, Drake has the most US Hot 100 hits ever. Runner up (Taylor Swift) is at 212.
- At 199, Drake has the most Top 40 US hits ever. Runner up (Taylor Swift) is at 119.
- At 76, Drake has the most Top 10 US hits ever. Runner up (Taylor Swift) is at 42.
- At 41, Drake has the most Top 5 US hits ever. Runner up (The Beatles) is at 29.
- Drake previously broke the record of the most simultaneous hits charted inside the Hot 100 on May 21, 2016 with 20, on April 8, 2017 with 24, then 27 on July 14, 2018.
- At 431 weeks, Drake holds the record of the longest run inside the Hot 100 from May 29, 2009 to August 19, 2017.
- On december 12, 2016, One Dance was the first song ever to hit 1 billion streams on Spotify.
NB: EAS means Equivalent Album Sales.
Dynamic Spotify Key Performance Indicators
As usual, feel free to comment and / or ask a question!
Sources: IFPI, Spotify, YouTube, Discogs, Billboard.
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Hi MJD!
Nice analysis as always, but I have 1 main question concerning how you calculate streaming equivalent sales, particularly audio streams.
Your method of calculating audio streaming equivalent sales of records is by multiplying the cumalative streams on Spotify with the ratio between the total audio market and Spotify in the current year, and finally dividing it by 1500.However, one problem I see is this: the growing share of Spotify among streaming platforms, hence a much smaller ratio for each year.
For older acts (eg. Beatles), their streams increase at a relatively slow pace. If we were to multiply their cumalative streams with an updated ratio, their streaming equivalent sales will undoubtedly be lower every year as the ratio keeps getting smaller and smaller.
However, this doesn't concerns those acts as much as acts of today that achieve huge streaming (eg. Drake) While streaming only takes up a small percentage of the total CSPC total for the former, the latter is the total opposite, with some acts total CSPC sales having more than half coming from streaming. What's more, with a dying market of album sales and downloads, these newer acts heavily rely on streaming to generate catalog "sales". If the records of these acts don't increase in streams at a certain pace on Spotify, then using a decreasing ratio every year will cause their totals to will remain more or less the same, perhaps even lower. Hence the concept of catalog sales is meaningless to them.
What I suggest doing is to multiply the streams of a record it achieved on Spotify during a year with the ratio of that particular year, and using the updated ratio for another year on the Spotify streams it achieved for that year. For example, let's say that an album achieved 500 million streams and 200 million streams for 2019 and 2020 respectively, while the share of Spotify among all audio streaming platforms is 40% and 50% respectively. What I suggest is to calculate like this: ((500m*100/40)+(200m*100/50))/1500= (1,25B+400m)/1500=1,1m audio streaming equivalents for 2019 and 2020
Of course, this is only a suggestion. Tell me your thoughts on this. If you were to use this formula I proposed, the only real problem is to keep a large database that shows how many streams an album generated each year and the share of Spotify among all audio streaming platforms each year as well.
Hi Raffi!
The main error on the old formula for streams was the paid users vs total users confusion. The formula was using the percentage of paid users of streaming services that were using Spotify as there was no data on IFPI report for free users. The problem is that paid-only platforms appeared, creating a very different share of "paid users" and "free users" using Spotify. The formula used the share of paid users, while counts of streams were built by all users combined.
Now that this is fixed and that each streaming platform took its place, I'm not expecting notable changes. For nearly 1 year now, Spotify goes up and down between 62% and 64% of the overall market, this is quite stable at the moment. The ratio is someway wrong for years 2012/2014, but the impact is minimal there. As noted on updates, the artists roughly doubled their streams during the last 10-11 months, e.g. last 2 years represent a good 80% of the total streams to date of an artist. If the formula deflates an artist results for pre-2015 years by 20% for example, that would be 20% out of 20%, an error around 4%, a percentage that gets smaller every week of new streams which lower even more the importance of 'old' streams.
Obviously, if a new change of policy, for example Spotify going premium only, changes the share of all services, the formula will be adjusted. I do not exclude the possibility of 'dating' streams as you mention to apply the most relevant formula for each stream. I stay optimistic there though about shares staying flat during the next months/years!
Hi, I just noticed for Drake all his features sales/streams are given to him 100%. Why is this?
It doesn't seem to make sense to give a feature 100% of a song's sales/streams, even if they were on the song for 5 seconds. Janelle Monae shouldn't receive 100% of We Are Young's sales/streams.
You also made the formula for video streams 11,754 = 1 album versus 1,500 = 1 album for audio streams, the reasoning being that video streams pay much less than audio.
An artist gets paid much less of a fraction from features than as lead artist, so shouldn't they receive a fraction of the sales/streams from features?
Hi Anon!
The case of features is definitely a tricky one. To be honest, I don't like the 100% attribution that much, but I can't see a better solution. I don't like using a fraction, say 50%, for two reasons: 1/ it is artificial, 2/ not all features are as relevant. Many blame Rihanna due to her numerous featurings, but on most of them she has a role at least as big as the lead singer. In the other side, someone like T-Pain or Nate Dogg were never the #1 singer of a song, Quavo seems to be following the same road.
For this reason, I can't fix a frozen percentage. I also can't dictate a distinct share for each feature as 1/ it wouldn't be valid, 2/ that would imply to listen / gauge each and every song for each artist. That's not possible.
It must be said that I took that decision when starting the first CSPC article with Rihanna and having in mind that I would study mostly major artists that are also pretty relevant to the songs on which they contribute. If tomorrow I work on Lil Jon, I'll most likely build an appendix to the concept to avoid getting a flawed total due to unweighted featurings!
Thanks for the reply MJD!
However, I think you should set a frozen percentage for these reasons:
-- Downloads have a frozen percentage. Even when some songs sell majority for 69 cents these days, instead of $1.29. Therefore despite half the price, they get the same representation in CSPC.
--Same applies with physical singles, frozen 1:3 weighting. Many physical singles before the late 90s/early 00s sales crash were $3.99+; however when single sales crashed many artists sold singles for as low as $0.49. They still count similar despite a price difference of near 10x.
--An album sale still counts as 1 sale, even if sold for $14.99 or 99 cents. Club sales are also counted which were commonly sold for below $1 through membership.
--Streams have a frozen weight despite some streams coming from $10+ per month subscribers, and the others coming from completely free users who generate 10x+ less revenue.
So seeing as all the other includings in CSPC have frozen percentages/ratios despite sometimes drastic changes in prices/revenue, why not create one for features? Sure there is features that are 15 seconds, and some that are 4 minutes in vocals but fully giving them 100% of sales/streams is just inflation for those that commonly do features. I think features should definitely be included when measuring careers, but not to the same extent as their own material in any case.
Hi again Anon!
I have to contradict the end of your message that states features are counted as their own material, they aren't! In fact an artist featuring on an other song has 100% of its streams/downloads, but he gets 0% of the album sales generated from that! For example, Love The Way You Lie isn't among Rihanna's top 10 hits, because stand-alone streams/downloads aren't enough to made up for the fact Rihanna was granted 0% of the album Recovery. That's how this song is worth a total of 4,65m EAS for Eminem while only 1,8m EAS for Rihanna (both figures are with old ratios but it doesn't change the idea).
As you can see, the "inflation" is limited with a mere 1,8m for a strong featuring on the biggest global hit of 2010. In terms of function, it also makes sense:
- if a consumer is interested in Eminem, he buys Recovery and Rihanna is awarded 0 sale. It's natural as the person is going after Eminem only.
- if a consumer is interested in the song only, not especially on Eminem, he buys the song and units go as much to Eminem than to Rihanna. It's natural as among buyers there will be as many casual listeners of Rihanna than Eminem.
True big hits like Yeah! by Usher generated a lot of album sales, so someone like Lil Jon gets only a tiny fraction of the song total units.
Then there is the case of very recent releases. As the industry continues to evolve, album sales are disappearing while featurings are always more numerous, with now not only duets but real all-stars hits coming out like Feels or I'm The One. Those songs aren't personalized though, they are party tunes, people do not really care about who's the credited author of it. The urban community too doesn't care about the leading act on a Drake / Rihanna / Nicki / Kanye song, they playlist all big R&B/Rap hits and that's it. After all, if nobody buys albums of DJ Khaled and Calvin Harris and most of their streams are acheived from the pages of Justin Bieber and Katy Perry, why would they be granted a bigger rate? Plus, those streaming-only hits do not create that much value. It takes nearly 1 billion Spotify streams to account for 1 million album sales, something Adele achieves by clapping her hands only!
One last point, by "frozen ratio" it wasn't about the price/setting ratios, clearly I have no issues with that. The problem comes with categorizing features. It would require to create a rank of features, duets-like (Love The Way You Like, 4 Minutes etc), grouped tunes (Feel, I'm The One), average participation (say Jay-Z on Beyonce's songs) and minor featurings (like Janelle on We Are Young). This implies to listen to every song something which is impossible to apply. The album factor does that perfectly, as the least shared a hit is, the most album sales it will generate, the more units will be assigned to the lead singer rather than the featured act.
If all-star songs continue to come out at fast pace, I may think about introducing a ratio on songs involving 3 or more acts. Something like:
- 1 featured act = 100% of albums generated to lead only, 100% of songs-related units to both the lead and the featured artist
- 2 featured acts = 100% of albums generated to lead only (they would be most likely low), 70% of songs-related units to each artist
- 3 featured acts = 100% of albums generated to lead only (they would be most likely low), 45% of songs-related units to each artist
- 4 or more featured acts = 100% of albums generated to lead only (they would be most likely low), 25% of songs-related units to each artist
Thanks for replying again.
I think the proposed ratio is a great idea. Features are the new norm so I definitely do think you will have to use a ratio for simple fairness in the future.
According to spotify Drake didn't reach 10 billion
streams until mid March this year.
Hi Tom!
Spotify counts only streams on which the artist is the main credit and also often excludes all remix versions, which explains the gap between their lists on those published on our site 🙂
Streaming is the best thing to ever happen to Drake when you look at his album sales without it added.
Hi Harry,
This is a very wrong reasoning - his album sales are not spectacular in comparison to 90s artists because of streaming, they cannibalize each other, you can't comment both sales avenues as if they were unrelated. If there was no streaming, he would sell an awful lot of CDs.
And I thought Rihanna is the only current music artist who is slaying in the us billboard hot 100 records. Looks like Drake is too.
How I wish they become a couple.
But I really feel Drake is not Rihanna's type.
I hope Rihanna changes her mindset and loves Drake back. The new generation's king and queen of music.
And...
Canadians rule! 🙂
Question from another article but related to Drake:
Hello MJD, Drake’s Scorpion was released this week ofcourse and lots of people were very shocked or underwhelmed by his first week numbers. Views did 1.04m first week in US, so ofcourse many people were expecting 1m+ for this since it had 2 #1’s preceding the album release. However I always thought 750-900k or such was more realistic, and he wouldn’t have a chance at passing Views since streams haven’t grown enough to makeup for goliath pure sales first weeks (out of Views 1.04m, 852K was from pure sales).
All of this ofcourse reminded me of the 25 vs. Divide talk, when Divide had a lower first week but was being streamed huge and you sided that Divide’s first week was actually more impressive. Scorpion is projected to do 3-4x the streams Views did first week, and 2x the current record holder. To me, that perfectly illustrates the industry change with first weeks for artists who have fully converted to streaming.
What are your thoughts on the first week of Scorpion?
That's absolutely true. By releasing his 'playlist' last year Drake made a clear statement against pure sales, telling his audience streaming is the real thing now. Thus it's no surprise to see that people who used to collect his albums in CD aren't interested in them anymore.
It doesn't make much sense to compare first week figures of Views and Scorpion. As you said, it's the same case of 25 vs Divide. Sales were much more frontloaded, the impact is immediate so a time frame as limited as 1-week will always favor an album relying more on pure sales. What matters for Scorpion is the amount of streams it is getting and that amount is gigantic. You can't get much more than that over 7 days when so many streams per people are needed to reach one unit. The album is already poised to go 3xP at least so that will end as a new massively successful record for Drake. As for challenging Views RTD number, only time will tell, that will require additional songs to become hits!
