God's Plan: This is how Drake has turned his brand into the business of the moment

[jrineakter]

Rapper Drake is among the most listened to artists; it doesn't matter when you read this. The Canadian has been breaking all sales records for a handful of years thanks to his ability to detect new musical trends, but also business trends.

Throughout this article we focus on the second aspect, on how Drake has managed to manage his personal brand to turn it into an extremely profitable business within a complicated, unstable industry, in constant identity crisis after the arrival of the digital era.

Lose the fear of change
The rules of the music market dictate – or had dictated until very recently – that hits have to be released one at a time. It was all on one hand. But Ed Sheeran changed the rules of the hong kong number data game by releasing two singles at the same time, and Drake followed suit, also last year, with the songs 'Passionfruit' and 'Portland'.

In January 2018, the Canadian artist repeated the strategy by placing two songs in the Top 10, tracks –'God's Plan' and 'Diplomatic Immunity'– that were combined into an EP called Scary Hours (Young Money / Cash Money / Republic Records). Although both songs can be purchased separately, together they add up to lead the sales charts, obtaining figures that work on their own as an unbeatable marketing strategy.

So the strategy of releasing hits in pairs has turned out to be a profitable move, and not the folly that many within the industry would have most likely predicted. Drake took a risk and won.

Digitize
Drake is the king of streaming. When the music industry began to change its skin from analogue to digital, with many artists lamenting their bad luck for not being able – or knowing how – to adapt to the new times, the Canadian rapper emerged from the dense American hip-hop scene and positioned himself at the top of all the charts.

READ MORE: How to digitalize a company to unanchor it from its past

One of the songs mentioned in the previous point, 'God's Plan', was played more than 14 million times in one day, thus smashing the world record of the Apple Music platform. In the US, in just over a week, the song surpassed 82.4 million plays and 127,000 downloads. Each of Drake's songs is a record-breaker on the Internet and that is due, in part, to the fact that he has known how to work the digital business like no one else.

Find your sector
The fact that Drake never stops generating musical hits has to do with the genre he works in, since being well positioned within the hip-hop scene is a guarantee of good numbers. Rap, trap, R&B… all urban music is in fashion, it's no secret, and it is after having fought for decades to win the favor of the industry.

Because the history of musicians in this genre could be read as an example of tenacity. Hip-hop was never a genre pampered by the media, which is usually more inclined to rock and, above all, pop. But today urban music is absolutely everywhere: in fact, in 2017, nine of the ten songs in the Top 10 belonged to this genre.

In this sense, we could say that Drake has landed on his feet in the transformation of the industry to the digital environment, yes, but it is also true that he has worked hard in a genre that was initially almost invisible. If it is a trend today, it is, in large part, thanks to him; he even knew how to see business in trap when no one else did.