Why Is Drake So Popular? I used statistics to try to find out.
Drake is undeniably the most impactful and important artist of the 2010’s, but why does his mixed bag discography warrant that title?
Whether you like it or not, Aubrey Graham, also known as Drake is the defining musical artist of the 2010s and continues his reign over the music industry to this day. On the Billboard charts, Drake has already racked up eight number one hits, forty-five top ten hits (most of all time), one hundred and twenty top forty hits (most of all time) and a mind-boggling two hundred and thirty-two top 100 hits (obviously the most of all time). After the release of his first major single “Best I Ever Had” Drake did not leave the Hot 100 charts for over eight years until there was a small Drake drought in late 2017 and early 2018 for about five months until he came back with “God’s Plan”, a song which debuted at number one and stayed in that spot for eleven weeks, and he’s been on every week since. When Scorpion released in 2018, seven of its tracks occupied the top ten, something that had never been done before or since. Scorpion also broke another record by having all twenty-five of its tracks in the Hot 100 the week it released, the record had previously been set at twenty-two by Drake with More Life which beat out the previous record holder, Drake with Views which had eighteen. Drake’s most recent chart record came earlier this year when he released Scary Hours II and it’s three tracks debuted at numbers one, two and three. Drake has been putting up Wilt Chamberlainesque numbers for years now and shows absolutely zero sign of stopping or slowing down.
However, when comparing Drake to other era-defining musicians like Michael Jackson, The Beatles and Elvis Presley, he gets nowhere near their levels of universal praise and acclaim. If you were to ask ten people the reason for this, you could easily get ten different answers: “all of his songs sound the same”, “he’s a culture vulture”, “he’s boring”, “the charts have become too decentralized due to streaming”, “rap is less universally popular than pop”, “his music hasn’t had time to age” but the most common answer you’ll get is most likely “because Drake’s music is bad”.
Is that true? Why, then, do we keep listening to him, giving him number one hits and letting him break records? What could possibly explain our infatuation with this seemingly unexciting and plain kid from Toronto?
I had always considered myself to be pretty neutral on Drake, with a handful of excellent songs and a handful of absolute trash ones that canceled each other out. I thought of Drake as the Nicholas Cage of music, someone who would either create a masterpiece or a dumpster fire with very little gray area in between, but I would still always show up when they perform, on the off-chance it might be something special. Honestly, though, like most people, if you pressed me on how much Drake I had actually listened to in order to form that judgment, I could probably name you a few singles and maybe one album. I wanted to go deeper, I wanted answers to those questions posed above. Why Drake?
Obviously, what makes music worth listening to is entirely subjective, which made approaching this question difficult. Ultimately I decided that the best way to determine the answer to my question was democratically, to get as many Drake opinions as I could on as many different Drake songs and albums as I could to determine my answer. Although I chose not to use aggregate music critic scores because they rarely match up with the opinions of the public in general and have their judgment clouded by other factors like the desires for an eye-catching headline, subconsciously making a rating by comparing music to whatever they’ve been listening to lately or as Jay-Z pointed out, the need to have the first review out in the age of the internet.
My first instinct was to poll my immediate friends, asking them to rate Drake on the whole on a scale of zero to five with no other information given. I only got thirty-two responses, which is relatively low, but still an ok sample size to begin with. Here are the results:
I was honestly surprised that almost every response was either neutral or positive, although I suspected that, like mine, these opinions were based on a relatively small sample size of Drake’s music. I wanted to go deeper, to explore every nook and cranny of Drake’s discography to get the most accurate answer I could.
I rounded up four of my most gullible friends who agreed to go through and individually rate every single Drake song and record released. While it’s only four people, I think we had a pretty good spread of initial opinions on Drake, one self-proclaimed fan, one self-proclaimed hater, and two neutral opinions (including myself).
Our first task was to create a standardized rating scale to avoid more varied rankings based on what each one of us considered a number to mean. We settled on a zero to ten scale: a zero meaning you despise a song and are actively upset by it, a two meaning you just generally dislike the song or have some strong feelings about it, a four meaning that a song has no real positive qualities, but also nothing really terrible to hate, a six meaning a song that you passively like, something you wouldn’t really seek out but would gladly keep it on if you heard it on the radio, an eight meaning you really like the song and would return to it or stream it again by choice and a ten meaning you love the song a lot and think it is near perfect or perfect. I set up a spreadsheet to input the data, then proceeded to go on a journey, guided by the 6 God, that would both enlighten me and make me go insane.
The Results
Why Drake? The short answer is that it’s really complicated. The first and most obvious place to look was the quality of his music. Taking the average rating of every song and then finding the average of all songs, the number we came up with was 6.46/10, which is just slightly above average, but that number on its own tells nowhere near the full story. It can’t reflect the seemingly random nature of Drake’s music, which switches quality massively from track to track and album to album, with massive peaks of artistic genius and deep valleys of trash. Going through and rating every individual track made it plainly obvious to me that the answer to my question wouldn’t be contained within one metric, much less the quality of each song. Though, I will go out of my way to answer the most obvious questions one might have when hearing about our process. “Toosie Slide” and “Unstoppable” tied at an average rating of 1 for the worst Drake songs while “Lord Knows and Nice For What” were the only songs to receive a perfect 10 average, making them the consensus best songs.
I tried to find the answer by gathering more statistics, but only ended up with more questions.
My first inclination was that even though Drake’s discography, on the whole, might be a mixed bag, what becomes popular is generally good. That required us to have a metric to measure the popularity of a song. After some deliberation, I decided that a fair enough measurement would take the average chart position of a song, and give it a multiplier of 0.10 for each week it stayed on the charts. Using this metric, we get a scale of 0 for all the songs that never charted to 410.8 for “God’s Plan”, Drake's most popular song.
And with that formula, I ended up with this graph.
This is, of course, a really clustered set of data, but it does kind of prove that idea, although the correlation is relatively small, likely due to the popular but terrible songs you see in the above 200, below 4 range. Those being “Toosie Slide” and “Controlla” respectively.
Next, I wanted to test the claim that Drake is a “culture vulture”, someone who rips off other musical styles that they have no affiliation with in order to gain popularity. Maybe that could have something to do with his success? I ended up finding 21 songs that I could reasonably define as some form of culture vulturing, around 10% of his discography. What I found from there, however, was far more interesting.
A song that could be considered culture vulturing on average was nearly two times as popular as a more original Drake song, mostly due to his dancehall smash hits “Controlla”, “One Dance” and “Passionfruit” and the two hits of Scorpion which took heavily from Bounce music, “Nice for What” and “In My Feelings”. To be fair, that still proves that a good percentage of Drake’s culture vultured songs are chart successes, even if they only make up a small percentage of his music in general.
I wanted to check if that relationship also applied to the quality of the music and came up with this graph.
This honestly surprised me as a fan of practically every genre that Drake takes from as a vulture and someone who is kind of cold to the more “unique” side of Drake that I find to be often boring and uninteresting.
What was more surprising to me though was the distribution of culture vultured songs amongst Drake’s albums.
More Life has 7 songs that I considered culture vulturing (“No Long Talk” and “Skepta Interlude” taking from UK Grime music, “Passionfruit”, “Get It Together”, “Madiba Riddim” and “Blem” taking from Dancehall and “KMT” pretty blatantly ripping the flow from XXXTentacion’s Look at Me). One-third of Drake’s culture vulturing is concentrated in this album and almost a third of the album itself is culture vulturing. Sure, this data probably can’t tell us anything about why Drake is as big as he is, but it definitely reflects the random and chaotic nature of his musical progression that could give us some more insight.
Besides his reputation as a culture vulture and mediocre hitmaker, Drake is also known as a pioneer in that he has been highly successful making both RnB music as well as rap. That versatility was the next thing I wanted to explore. Does Drake’s mixed reputation come from his mixed musical styles and lack of willingness to specialize?
This was, to me, the most surprising data I found during my research. While Drake’s RnB music hovered around an average of 5, his rap songs averaged just above a 7. That’s nearly a 40% difference between the genres. The most obvious way to rationalize this would be to point to a lack of effort or a shortage of songs in general in which Drake is singing. While it is true that Drake’s RnB songs comprise just over a third of his discography (78/223 songs), it’s undeniable that Drake self identifies, at least in part, as an RnB singer like when he famously called out Meek Mill on Back to Back for “getting bodied by a singin ni**a”.
Although this relationship still isn’t entirely conclusive, it might seem to indicate that within Drake’s discography, a correlation between quality and success may in part depend on what genre a song is. Why do Drake’s chart successes seem more merited when genre is taken into account? I honestly can’t say. It just contributes more to the strange realities of Drake’s discography.
This genre versatility that Drake is known for also contributes to his reputation as being someone who works extremely well with others. Drake has gained notoriety as he has the ability to seemingly singlehandedly bring unknown artists into the mainstream, like Lil Baby with Yes, Indeed, BlocBoy JB with Look Alive, Tuesday with ILOVEMAKONNEN and even arguably playing an instrumental role in launching Migos into superstardom with the Versace Remix.
The data regarding Drake’s collaborations in a general sense were largely predictable and not very interesting. Collaborations and solo tracks had roughly the same average rating, but predictably, by their nature collaborations performed slightly better on the charts as Drake pulled in some of the listeners of whoever he collaborated with. The data regarding who specifically Drake collaborated with, is far more interesting.
One probably could have guessed that Rihanna would be at the top of this graph, but I don’t think they could have predicted her having such a massive lead on everyone else. Both of their collaborations, “Take Care” and “Too Good”, scored over 275 on our chart success scale, classifying them both as hits. Also surprisingly, Drake’s most notable collaborators, Lil Wayne, Nicki Minaj, Rick Ross and Future, only ended up around the middle of the pack and behind less notable collaborators like Majid Jordan (who rode off the success of “Just Hold On, We’re Going Home”) and 2 Chainz.
The data only got more interesting when I looked at the quality of each of these collaborations.
Most clearly surprising is how good we considered Drake’s Sampha collaborations, “Too Much” and “4422”, despite their relatively low chart position and Sampha’s relative obscurity. Also interesting was just how terribly Giggs and PARTYNEXTDOOR compared to the rest of Drake’s collaborators. While Giggs might be able to get off the hook due to a relatively low sample size of only two songs, PARTYNEXTDOOR has collaborated with Drake six times, putting him only behind Future with fourteen and Lil Wayne with twelve for the most Drake features. PARTYNEXTDOOR just happens to be that blatantly awful because his frequent collaborations and general association with Drake also did nothing to help his chart success.
Next, I wanted to look at how Drake progressed over time to see if that could do us any good in figuring out his success as well as his lack of recognition.
For simplicity’s sake, I decided to consider every major Drake release an album, even though technically Dark Lane Demo Tapes, What A Time To Be Alive, If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late, and So Far Gone are mixtapes, Care Package is a compilation and More Life is a “playlist” (whatever that means). I was actually surprised to find that those projects labeled as “albums” all did better than every non-album with the exception of Drake’s debut album, Thank Me Later. This is weird to me given that in the digital age, the differences between these forms of releasing music are essentially meaningless.
Of course, that’s only how well each project did commercially. What’s more interesting is the quality distribution among these projects.
The first thing I noticed in this graph was the massive shift between the top and bottom of the graph charting success. While If You’re Reading This, It’s Too Late was one of Drake’s worst-performing projects, it was the best quality-wise according to us. Conversely, Views, being Drake’s most commercially successful project, was our least favorite, and besides So Far Gone, it wasn’t particularly close. Also notable, Drake’s second most popular project, Scorpion, was not particularly good either, implying some strange inverse correlation between Drake’s successful and his good albums.
In a last-ditch effort to find something definitive in these Drake related statistics, I attempted to find something having to do with where a song was placed on an album. Nothing that I found was really conclusive of much, but much like the rest of this data, it was oddly captivating.
While everything beyond the seventeenth track should probably be considered irrelevant due to a lack of sample size, there’s still a lot here to chew on. Most notably, the massive drops in quality on the fifth and thirteenth tracks. The fifth track drop can be explained almost entirely to just how terrible “Toosie Slide” is combined with a slew of other just mediocre songs. The thirteenth track drop is more straightforward, in that besides “Pound Cake” on Nothing Was the Same and “Demons” on Dark Lane Demo Tapes basically every track at this position is straight garbage. I like to think that this has something to do with the many superstitions surrounding the number, it’s only fate, really. The fourteenth track is only slightly better for similar reasons, it’s only saving grace being “War”, also from Dark Lane Demo Tapes.
Could this have anything to do with a song’s success though?
Surprisingly, the fifth track flies high above most of its competition here, riding off the success of “Take Care” and the aforementioned “Toosie Slide”. Obviously, though, the most striking thing about this graph is the chart dominance of Drake’s twentieth track choices. Although it’s a sample size of only three songs, two of them are “Hotline Bling” and “Fake Love”, both of which were mega-hits. It’s a similar story with the twenty-first track, having an even smaller sample size with only two songs but including “In My Feelings”, which puts it so high here.
What We Learned
Over the past two months, I have listened to at least 100 hours of Drake music, giving every song a one through ten ratings, then going back over and over again, attempting to scrape some kind of meaning from his massive and strange discography. The main lesson that I picked up on over that period was that Drake is unique. He’s a really frustrating artist to attempt to get a hold on or to try to find meaning in just due to the insane amount of variety and randomness in his music. Drake is incredibly varied in every aspect of his music; the quality, mood and genre of songs even contained within a single album is staggering. Using More Life as an example, you have typical trap anthems like “Free Smoke”, Drake attempting to do his best impression of UK Grime on “No Long Talk”, Caribbean dancehall tracks like “Madiba Riddim”. moody and depressing RnB like on “Teenage Fever” and a long rambling freestyle on “Do Not Disturb”. This brought me to the conclusion that Drake is a kind of musical putty, morphing into whatever he needs to be given the song and especially the cultural background in which it was made. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing for his music, but I think it can help to explain the answer to both of my questions of “Why Drake?” and “Why isn’t he thought of in the same way as other era-defining artists?”. Drake could never be considered a cultural cornerstone like other major artists because unlike those whose music defines their era, Drake’s era defines his music. This becomes evident even in looking at his earliest project, Room 4 Improvement, which takes many notes from the lighter, more uplifting, sample-heavy sound that defined popular Chicago rappers at the time like Common and early Kanye. Yet later in his career, Drake seems to echo the trends and styles he borrows off of rather than being an innovator or a bandwagoner. It’s not a coincidence that when trap music began steadily gaining mainstream appeal around 2015, Drake has a major shift in style on both If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and his collaboration with Future, What a Time To Be Alive. Drake is a cultural megaphone through which these semi-underground sounds can become mainstream in the United States, more recently amplifying Caribbean Dancehall, UK Grime and New Orleans Bounce. That explains why his songs that could be considered culture vulturing are so successful compared to his more original work. That explains why Drake seems to find chart success irregardless of the quality or genre of the song. That is the best answer I could find to the question of “Why Drake?”.