To Catch A Predator--Drake Episode

Is Drake's record label a pyramid scheme?

Rap battles are a feature of hip-hop. Ever since the tradition of speaking over drum breaks emerged, people have claimed their superior skills in the art form. There’s simply more words in rap than in other forms of songwriting, so there’s more space to do verbal tricks and differentiate oneself from other writers. The result is that rap is a competitive sport over listener’s ears. As these battles get more emotional, they sometimes involve peoples’ personal lives. Fame will do ugly things to a man, and in these competitions for recognition, the darker sides of one’s artistic platform are sometimes revealed.

The recent Kendrick and Drake beef created a slew of really great, anger-inspired music that escalated with the attempted destruction of each other’s character.  One thing Kendrick asserted over a few tracks is that Drake is a predator in a very real sense. Among more serious sexual allegations that I’m not interested in writing about, Kendrick claims that Drake preys on fellow rappers, gaining street credibility and the ears of the youth by surrounding himself with younger and more underground writers. In that way, an aging artist in the pop music market can remain relevant.

Drake has featured many smaller artists and bolstered their careers by deigning to make a song with someone who half his listeners don’t know about. His argument is that by putting an underground rapper on his album, that rapper’s music streams will increase many times over. The claim that Drake is using up-and-coming artists could be balanced out by the viewpoint that it is really a win-win relationship.

These things become difficult in the entertainment business, where image is involved. Rap is still trying to outgrow the gangster image that dominated the platform from the mid-eighties for about twenty years. Drake is one of the earlier artists to challenge that stereotype by being, well, Canadian. He had no problem crooning against the grain and being known as the sensitive guy.

Drake himself said in 2023, “I wasn’t really gangster ‘till now.” Some point to his 2018 track “Mob Ties” claiming connections to organized crime as the inflection point where Drake started to cater to a more aggressive audience. Since then, he has surrounded himself with younger stars who claim a lifestyle of crime. While Drake claims that he has a genuine relationship with these artists, Kendrick claims that Drake is perpetuating a dangerous lifestyle that he never had to rely on for food.

Kendrick also leans into the fact that Drake has been outed for using ghostwriters throughout his career. Many of these ghostwriters were artists that Drake signed to his label and trapped into writing strictly for him. The Weeknd, consistently one of the top five streaming artists today, is probably the most famous artist you almost never heard of. Drake followed the Weeknd’s rise, showing up to his concerts and studio sessions, consistently asking the Weeknd to sign to his label. After Drake built half of his 2012 sophomore album off of songs that the Weeknd wrote for his own debut, Weeknd decided he could tell what their partnership would look like and declined Drake’s offer. Take Care is still considered by many to be Drake’s best album.

Other times, Drake’s hits come from artists who he essentially contracts to write a song for him. Just this last week, someone leaked the reference track for “Mob Ties,” revealing that Vory, who you probably have never heard of, wrote the song. In other words, Drake’s more recent gangster persona is built by others. Drake reads these lines like an actor in a film, and people like Vory profit briefly off a writing credit, but their careers continue to stay stagnant.

What one calls good business, others might call predatory. It depends on who you’re asking. Drake defendants want to see a man in his prime continue making hits. Others watching promising talent disappear under Drake’s label wonder if the collateral damage is worth the price of poolside tunes.

Public opinion has decidedly sided with Kendrick, but one can hardly blame Drake for his predatory business dealings. He learned from the most successful businessmen. He decided early on to become like the record labels who own him.

Jon Bellion, a hit-making songwriter who once had an explosive career as a performer, stepped out of the spotlight because he realized how parasitic his record label and promoting deals were. On a recent podcast with George Janko, Bellion spoke about his record deal:

“There is a group of people that wait to prey on new ideas that are coming from natural places to then put an amount in front of you that is the most you’ve ever seen in your life and you’re not realizing what it is. It’s like, ‘I’m eating ramen noodles every night. You’re giving me ten grand to make beats? When I was selling them for $25 a pop? Like, I’ll take that.’ And then you’re like, four years later like, ‘oh, you’re catching 86% of my royalties overseas’…the math’s not mathing at all.”

Bellion went on to talk about his deal with Live Nation, the concert promoter who owns 64% of the 88 top grossing amphitheaters in the US. Ticketmaster controls 82% of primary tickets at these 88 amphitheaters. When Live Nation and Ticketmaster merged in 2010, they cornered the market of artists’ public visibility, meaning almost any major artist has a deal with Live Nation.

“[I realized] I’m gonna be on the road eleven months out of the year just trying to pay [this advance] back…When you figure that out on the road and you’re like ‘why did we buy 300 rolls of toilet paper? Why do we have to spend this much on catering every day?’ No one’s eating the pizza, we’re throwing out pies… wait a second, in my contract it says you’ve gotta spend this much on catering and it comes out of my pocket? But then I have to pay an advance back? And by the way, the advance you have to give me is only on hard ticket sales… they own all the venues, it’s a monopoly, so then now they just want my body in this room so they can sell food and alcohol and whatever so then they’re gonna make tons of money, and they got me like schleppin around the United States talkin’ ‘bout ‘I wanna be famous!’ … If I’m only making my advance back on hard ticket sales, that means I’m going to have to sell out every single venue in order to not go in the red… And by the way, they reserve the right in the contract to put the tickets on sale. So when it’s $100 a ticket and they do their ‘summer blow out sale,’ the tickets are only $10.”

Jon Bellion was so upset by these realizations that he paid himself out of his Live Nation deal. Other artists recognize the pyramid scheme at work and hope to one day enter the tiny circles where artists are actually profitable. Drake is certainly in one of those circles, and his buy-in to his benefactors has exposed a dark perpetuation of predatory cycles I wrote about previously.

It seems that most enterprises that get this big do so at the expense of someone in the chain of command. Everyone wants to hear the product of Drake’s $400 Million record deal, but nobody wants to know how many careers he’s killed. Everyone wants the Amazon package in one day, but no one wants to see the warehouse worker’s hands. I love to see Kendrick take a morally founded stance against someone and win, but consumers will likely have to make some sacrifices if we want more altruistic leaders at the helm of production and distribution.