Drake's Spotify takeover shows how broken the music industry is

A funny thing happened to Spotify Friday. As part of the streaming service's first-ever total artist takeover, visitors to the Browse homepage were greeted with a massive grid of Drake faces, on the cover of nearly every one of the page's playlists. "Grime Shutdown," "Fresh Gospel," "Indie Party," "Ambient Chill," "Bachata" and, hilariously, "Best of British," all categories that could only tangentially be tied to the artist, suddenly became Drake playlists, as part of a massive ad campaign for the rapper's new album "Scorpion."

Users instantly mocked Spotify's all-Drake facelift on social media for its shamelessness, garnering comparisons to U2's infamous album-release debacle in 2014, in which Apple placed a copy of the band's "Songs of Innocence" release in users' iTunes libraries without warning or permission. Yet, as "Scorpion" continues its quest to crush every streaming record available — as of Tuesday, Drake songs occupied No. 1 though 13 on Spotify's U.S. Top 50 chart — its rollout seems uniquely depressing, neatly encapsulating everything that's wrong with the music industry in 2018. It's a dystopian time for listeners, in which Spotify serves as both a music provider and a tastemaker-for hire while artists like Drake seemingly expand their albums to feature-film runtimes in order to gain the maximum number of streams, and sales, possible.

With "Scorpion's 25 songs, Drake has doubled down on the release strategy that enabled his poorly-reviewed 2016 album "Views" to nevertheless break virtually every streaming record: an extra-long tracklist that includes all of his successful recent singles. Thanks to the Recording Industry Association of America's streaming rules, which recently changed to factor streams into an album's sales figures and gold/platinum certifications,  that formula means that "Scorpion" was platinum-eligible before it was even released, and is well on its way to record-breaking first-week numbers.

"Scorpion" is not a very good album, for the same reasons behind its success. The album's 25 songs feel excessive, with neither one of “Scorpion’s Side A or Side B  coming close to the quality of Drake’s golden-age releases “Take Care” (2011) or “Nothing Was the Same” (2013).

Drake's cynical streaming strategy has beckoned plenty of other overstuffed pop and rap albums since the release of the 82-minute "Views," with recent examples including Migos' "Culture II" (105 minutes, 24 songs), Rae Sremmurd's "SR3MM" (101 minutes, 27 songs), DJ Khaled's "Grateful" (87 minutes, 23 songs), Eminem's "Revival" (77 minutes, 19 songs), Lana Del Rey's "Lust for Life" (72 minutes, 16 songs) and, longest of all, Chris Brown's 45-song "Heartbreak on a Full Moon," which was was certified gold in its first 10 days despite its lack of Top 40 singles.

With the exception of albums like Kendrick Lamar’s "To Pimp a Butterfly" (17 songs) and Solange’s "A Seat at the Table" (21 songs), featuring tracklists loosely united around themes that give the lengthy runtimes a purpose, the majority of pop albums with hour-plus runtimes could use editing. Yet, Drake has no incentive to make a quality album, given how much money he’s about to make with his 89-minute one. For listeners, if this trend towards overlong releases means subpar music from their favorite artists, well, too bad.

Of course, it was RIAA's streaming rules that helped encourage artists to expand their new albums to their breaking point. And Spotify's wall-to-wall promotion of "Scorpion" seemed to emphasize the gap between the Drake-level stars, who can drop enough money to rent out the streaming service's homepage, and the smaller fish in the music industry pond, less-established artists who have seen their livelihoods destabilized by streaming's notoriously-low payouts.

Found on Spotify's Browse page are the service's most influential playlists, with an appearance on lists like New Music Friday and RapCaviar capable of boosting a rising artist to stardom, and a slot in Today's Top Hits worth $100,000+ in potential revenue. The symbolism of seeing Drake's face splashed across those top playlists and more on the Browse page Friday, including ones that didn't even feature his music, made an unflattering statement about which artists hold the most power in the streaming age.

That's good news for Spotify, great news for Drake, and depressing news for music fans, who are left with this conclusion — that Drake engineered his mediocre album around breaking streaming records, Drake paid Spotify to feature exclusively his face on its homepage, Spotify will pay Drake huge royalties, and everyone else will be worse for it.

WSBTV