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In 2009, after he had retired from his old career as a teen-age actor, and just as he was launching his new career as a grownup hip-hop star, Drake made a prediction: \u201cWhen my album drop, bitches\u2019ll buy it for the picture \/ And niggas\u2019ll buy it, too, and claim they got it for they sister.\u201d His verse betrayed lots of confidence about the magnitude of his growing popularity and also, perhaps, a few misgivings about the nature of it. The next year, he released his official d\u00e9but album, \u201cThank Me Later,\u201d and indeed plenty of people bought it\u2014enough of them, of whatever sex, to push it to the top of the album chart, both in America and in Canada, Drake\u2019s home country. Back then, conventional wisdom still held that achieving pop-music success meant selling your album to a wide range of customers, including some who might have felt sheepish about their purchase. But the rise of Drake coincided with a shift in the business model of pop music: our most successful artists no longer need to worry about who is and isn\u2019t buying their albums. In 2010, when \u201cThank Me Later\u201d arrived in record stores, physical-album sales were already collapsing as listeners turned to digital downloads, and then, increasingly, to services such as Spotify. In the streaming era, people don\u2019t need to pay for albums at all; they can just press play on whatever they\u2019re in the mood for, or else let playlists and algorithms guide them. There is nothing to buy, besides a subscription, and therefore nothing to justify: you can listen to all the Drake you want, no alibi required.<\/p>\n
In 2016, the first year streaming services accounted for the majority of American music-industry revenue, Drake was the most listened-to artist on Spotify. (He is currently the third most listened-to artist in the service\u2019s history, behind only Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny.) Drake\u2019s tracks were unabashedly and extraordinarily seductive: he was a charming and malleable rapper, happy to appropriate American hip-hop slang or Jamaican patois; if some of it sounded slightly ludicrous, coming from a former cast member<\/a> of the Canadian teen drama \u201cDegrassi: The Next Generation,\u201d Drake knew that we didn\u2019t care. He had a voice soft and clear enough to make sure no one missed his punch lines, and an ability to switch, sometimes mid-verse, from rapping to singing, from bragging to pleading. Neither his promises nor his threats were entirely credible, but he wasn\u2019t really asking people to believe in him\u2014the tracks, like the relationships they often chronicled, didn\u2019t require long-term investments. \u201cI\u2019ve been avoiding commitment, that\u2019s why I\u2019m in this position,\u201d as he once put it. Drake was just asking people to tap \u201cplay,\u201d while creating hours of sleek and infectious music that made it nearly impossible not to.<\/p>\n