You have to hand it to Drake. Having spent the last year stoking fans’ anticipation with teasers for his new ‘Iceman’ project, he pulled a switcheroo by releasing three new albums on Friday (15 May).
‘Iceman’ is one of the three: 18 tracks of new music as expected. But it was accompanied by the 14-track ‘Maid of Honour’ and 11-track ‘Habibti’ as well. All three were released by OVO under exclusive licence to UMG’s Republic Records, which we’ll come back to in a minute.
It’s partly a flex of genre range: harder-edged rap on ‘Iceman’, a more R&B/sad-bangers feel to ‘Habibti’ and then not-sad actual-dance-bangers on ‘Maid of Honour’. But releasing three albums in 2026 is also a flex for streaming stats.
Drake duly became the most-streamed artist in a single day on Spotify this year; a 1,100% increase in simultaneous listeners on Apple Music, where ‘Iceman’ topped its charts in 79 countries; and the biggest first-day streaming debut globally on Amazon Music in 2026.
At the time of writing, Drake has 12 of the top 20 songs on Spotify’s global daily chart – all of them from ‘Iceman’ – although his top track ‘National Treasures’ is still just over 1m daily streams short of Michael Jackson’s cinema-assisted chart-topper ‘Billie Jean’.
(Depending on when you read this, the chart may have refreshed, but this was correct at the time of writing.)
On Spotify, ‘Iceman’ currently has 395.4m streams, although 194.7m of them came from lead single ‘What Did I Miss?’, which came out last July.
’Maid of Honour’ has 242.8m streams (but 201.8m of them are for Central Cee collaboration ‘Which One’ which also came out last July) while ‘Habibti’ has 42.8m streams with no boost from earlier-released singles. So, clearly it’s ‘Iceman’ doing the heavy lifting breaking those DSP records for now.
What any of this means depends on whether you like Drake or not: you can expect several days of hot, lukewarm and (ice) cold takes on whether the triple-album salvo makes him a comeback king or an underperforming fraud. The sensible response is to watch the stream-counts over the next month.
We were interested to see one of the takes so far, from Investing·com, focus on what Friday’s multi-drop means for Drake’s contractual relationship with UMG. The speculation being that it could be “an attempt at satisfying contractual obligations” with the major.
The analysts speculating may well know as little as we do about the actual terms of Drake’s licensing relationship with Republic/UMG, including whether it’s for a specific number of projects or not.
However, with the star’s legal battle against UMG still rumbling – he is appealing the dismissal of his defamation lawsuit – speculation about whether a contractually-satisfied parting of the ways is in his future is inevitable. Fans, meanwhile, have three new albums worth of lyrics to mine for clues on his intentions.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source musically.com ’
