News July 1, 2018

Fans slam Spotify’s excessive marketing campaign for Drake’s new record

On Friday, Drake released his latest album, Scorpion, and fans have been loving the record enough to see it smash a number of streaming records. However, some Spotify users have been sharing their frustration at the artist’s saturating presence on their accounts.

At 90 minutes, Scorpion is not only the longest album in Drake’s catalogue, but arguably his most ambitious as well, featuring guest vocals from artists as diverse as Nai Palm from Australia’s Hiatus Kiayote, and even the late Michael Jackson. As a result, promotion for the record went into overdrive in the lead up to its release.

As The Verge notes, all this marketing and promotion has definitely paid off, with Scorpion breaking the single-day streaming record for Apple Music (with the record previously being set by Drake’s previous release, More Life), and setting the record for the largest single-day streaming total for any record on any streaming service.

However, if you were to head over to Spotify right now, you might notice something – namely that Drake’s face is absolutely everywhere.

Yes, as an increasingly frustrated group of users on Reddit have noted, Spotify’s Browse section currently includes a number of playlists, with almost all of them featuring the rapper’s face on them. Most confusingly though, as Reddit user jakebirdseye points out, “less than 50% of them actually have Drake in the playlist.”

“Spotify is being such an unprofessional company to the point of disrespecting the artists that are in those playlists,” they continue. “And when they realize that they can get paid by any famous artist for this shit to happen, it will become a recurring thing.”

“I just think it should stop now before it gets out of hand.”

Image of Drake’s saturation of the Spotify home page.

While it certainly is confusing as to why Drake would be featured on the playlist artwork for ‘Best Of British’, Variety have noted that it is indeed a part of an unprecedentedly large advertising campaign focused on getting Drake to break as many records as possible.

“In an unexpected move, given Drake’s long history with Apple Music, they’ve also gone big with Spotify, teaming up with the service for its first-ever global dedicated artist takeover, called “ScorpionSZN,” whereby Drake takes over multiple playlists on the same day,” Variety writes.

“The MC is on the cover of RapCaviar, Beast Mode, Today’s Top Hits, Morning Commute and others — including ones where his music isn’t even featured.”

The fact that this is described as the “first-ever global dedicated artist takeover” makes it seem as though this is just the first of any more to come in the future. Of course, this raises a number of questions, including who the next big artist to take part in such a campaign might be. But most importantly, given the largely negative reaction to such a takeover, it’s worth wondering whether or not such a campaign is worth pissing off a large portion of loyal listeners.

However, if you consider the fact that Drake has broken a bunch of records in the space of two days and will undoubtedly set plenty more to come, it looks like this one might be what they call a success. So you may need to get used to seeing huge artists like Drake and Post Malone taking over the artwork for your ‘Aussie Hits’ playlist in the future.