Drake (musician)

• 1. Introduction

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  Aubrey Drake Graham sold more than 170 million music units worldwide before the age of 40. He holds more Billboard Hot 100 records than any other solo male artist in history, including the most charted songs, the most top-ten hits, and the most consecutive weeks on the chart. But his story did not begin in a recording studio or on a stadium stage. It began on Weston Road in Toronto's working-class west end, in a small basement apartment shared with his mother, a teacher and florist named Sandra Graham. How did a child actor on a Canadian teen drama become the defining commercial force in hip-hop for an entire decade? And what happens when that dominance runs into its limits?

• 2. Toronto Roots

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  Dennis Graham, an African-American drummer from Memphis, Tennessee, who once performed alongside Jerry Lee Lewis, met Sandra Sher at Club Bluenote in Toronto, where she was in the audience. Their son Aubrey was born on the 24th of October 1986. The marriage did not last. When Drake was five years old, his parents divorced. His father returned to Memphis, where he was incarcerated for a number of years on drug-related charges, and limited finances kept him from returning to Canada for much of Drake's childhood.

  Drake grew up moving between two very different versions of Toronto. On Weston Road, he played minor hockey with the Weston Red Wings and showed enough promise as a right winger to reach the Upper Canada College hockey camp. That path ended after an opposing player delivered a vicious cross-check to his neck. His mother pulled him from the sport, and the family eventually relocated to Forest Hill, one of the city's most affluent neighbourhoods, in 2000. The move carried its own complications. Drake later described their home there bluntly: "a half of a house we could live in... It was not big, it was not luxurious. It was what we could afford."

  At his new high school, Forest Hill Collegiate Institute, Drake said he was bullied for his racial and religious background. He had attended a Jewish day school in his earlier years and become a bar mitzvah. During his teenage years, he worked at a furniture factory in Toronto owned by his maternal grandfather, Reuben Sher. He eventually decided his class schedule was getting in the way of an acting career he was already pursuing, dropped out of school, and did not receive his high school diploma until October 2012, at age 25.

• 3. Jimmy Brooks to Mixtape King

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  At 15, Drake was introduced to a high school friend's father who worked as an acting agent. That introduction led directly to a role on Degrassi: The Next Generation, the CTV teen drama in which Drake portrayed Jimmy Brooks, a basketball star who became physically disabled after being shot by a classmate. The role paid the bills during years when his mother was seriously ill. "We were very poor, like broke," he recalled. "The only money I had coming in was Canadian TV."

  According to showrunners Linda Schuyler and Stephen Stohn, Drake regularly arrived late on set after spending nights in recording sessions. He reportedly struck a deal with the set's security guards to let him sleep in a dressing room after late-night recording, rather than miss his call time entirely.

  His first recorded song, "Do What You Do", appeared on a soundtrack for The N, the American network that aired Degrassi in the United States. He co-formed an R&B duo called The Renaissance with singer Melanie Fiona, though the pair never released an album. Musically, he cited Jay-Z and Clipse as his primary inspirations.

  In 2006, Drake self-released Room for Improvement, a mixtape featuring Trey Songz and Lupe Fiasco. He described it as "pretty straightforward, radio friendly, not much content to it." The project sold roughly 6,000 copies and earned Drake $304.04 in royalties. His first concert, on the 19th of August 2006 at the Kool Haus nightclub, had him opening for Ice Cube, performing for half an hour and earning $100.

  His second mixtape, Comeback Season, came out in 2007 on his newly founded October's Very Own label. Its single "Replacement Girl" sampled a track by Brisco, Flo Rida, and Lil Wayne, retaining Lil Wayne's verse. That choice opened a direct line: Lil Wayne invited Drake to Houston to join the Tha Carter III tour, and on the road the two recorded multiple songs together, planting the seeds of Drake's eventual record deal.

• 4. Breakthrough and Billboard Dominance

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  So Far Gone, released in 2009, was made available as a free download through Drake's OVO blog and received over 2,000 downloads in its first two hours. Its singles "Best I Ever Had" and "Successful" both reached Platinum certification, with "Best I Ever Had" peaking at number two on the Billboard Hot 100. The mixtape's success triggered what was widely reported as one of the biggest bidding wars in the music industry, ending with Drake signing to Young Money Entertainment on the 29th of June 2009. During a performance that July in Camden, New Jersey, he fell on stage and tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his right knee.

  His debut album, Thank Me Later, was released on the 15th of June 2010 after three postponements. It debuted at number one on the Billboard 200 with sales of over 447,000 copies in its first week. A free concert at New York City's South Street Seaport drew 25,000 fans and was shut down by police after near-riot conditions developed in the overflowing crowd.

  Take Care, released on the 15th of November 2011, became the most consequential album of Drake's early career. It won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Album at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards, was later certified six times platinum by the RIAA, and was ranked by Rolling Stone among its 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Producer Noah "40" Shebib built a low-tempo, sensuous, and dark sonic landscape around it. The Club Paradise Tour that supported the album grossed over $42 million, making it the most successful hip-hop tour of 2012.

  Views, his fourth studio album, arrived in April 2016 as an Apple Music and iTunes exclusive before broader release. It sat atop the Billboard 200 for thirteen weeks and simultaneously led both the Billboard Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 for eight weeks. Its single "One Dance" became the first song in history to surpass one billion streams on Spotify. The Summer Sixteen Tour, mounted jointly with Future, became the highest-grossing hip-hop tour of all time at that point, earning $84.3 million across 56 dates according to Pollstar.

• 5. Records and the Record Books

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  Scorpion, Drake's fifth studio album, released on the 29th of June 2018 with a runtime of just under 90 minutes. It broke the one-day global streaming records on both Spotify and Apple Music, accumulating 132.45 million and 170 million plays respectively. Its singles "God's Plan", "Nice for What", and "In My Feelings" collectively kept Drake atop the Billboard Hot 100 for 29 weeks. "God's Plan" became the first song he had certified Diamond by the RIAA, and is currently tied for the fourth highest-certified digital single in United States history.

  The records accumulated steadily across the 2020s. On the 5th of March 2021, Drake released the EP Scary Hours 2, whose three songs, "What's Next", "Wants and Needs", and "Lemon Pepper Freestyle", entered the Billboard Hot 100 at positions one, two, and three simultaneously. He became the first artist to achieve that feat. In January 2021, he became the first artist to surpass 50 billion combined streams on Spotify.

  Certified Lover Boy, released on the 3rd of September 2021, charted all of its songs on the Billboard Hot 100 and became the first album to place nine songs in the top ten simultaneously. Drake accumulated 8.6 billion on-demand streams in 2021 alone, making him the most overall streamed artist of the year in the United States. One out of every 131 streams that year was a Drake song.

  Her Loss, his 2022 collaborative album with 21 Savage, extended his record for most top-ten entries on the Billboard Hot 100 to 67, with 49 of those as a lead artist. Billboard named him Artist of the Decade for the 2010s, the highest-grossing hip-hop touring artist, and the fourth greatest pop star of the 21st century. He holds records on four separate Billboard charts: Hot Rap Songs, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay, and Rhythmic Airplay.

• 6. Beyond Music

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  Drake founded OVO Sound, his record label, alongside the production company DreamCrew and a fragrance house called Better World. He launched the fashion label OVO and the Nocta collaboration with Nike. In 2016, he began working with Brent Hocking on Virginia Black, a bourbon whiskey. He became a co-owner of the esports and gaming organization 100 Thieves.

  In 2013, the Toronto Raptors named him their global ambassador. He joined the team's executive committee and later obtained naming rights to their practice facility, which became the OVO Athletic Centre. When the Raptors won the NBA Championship in 2019, Drake released two songs on an EP titled The Best in the World Pack to mark the occasion.

  His partnership with Apple Music, which included the Apple Music and iTunes exclusivity window for Views, contributed to the platform's growth in ways that industry observers credited to him directly. Music recognition app Shazam identified him as their most searched artist in 2022, with music featuring Drake collecting 350 million recognitions. His 2016 single "One Dance" alone collected 17 million Shazam recognitions.

  In 2018, one analysis estimated Drake was responsible for roughly 5 percent of Toronto's annual tourism income, an amount calculated at approximately CAD $440 million of the city's CAD $8.8 billion total. Toronto Metropolitan University began teaching courses titled "Deconstructing Drake and the Weeknd" in 2022, using the pair's catalogues to explore the Canadian music industry, race, class, and globalization.

• 7. The Feud and Its Fallout

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  Kendrick Lamar's verse on the song "Control" in 2013 was described at the time as friendly competition; the two artists had previously collaborated, and Lamar served as Drake's opening act on the Club Paradise Tour in 2012. The situation had changed sharply by March 2024, when Lamar dissed Drake on Future and Metro Boomin's "Like That". What followed was one of the most intensively covered rap feuds in the genre's history.

  Drake released "Push Ups" and "Taylor Made Freestyle" on the 19th of April 2024. Lamar responded with "Euphoria" on the 30th of April, then "6:16 in LA" on the 3rd of May. That same day, Drake dropped "Family Matters" on YouTube, accusing Lamar of domestic abuse. Lamar released "Meet the Grahams" twenty minutes later and followed with "Not Like Us" the following day, accusing Drake of pedophilia. Drake responded with "The Heart Part 6" on the 5th of May, denying the accusations and claiming he had fed Lamar false information.

  Lamar was widely considered to have won the exchange. Justin Sayles of The Ringer wrote the feud "saw Drake sink to the lowest levels of his career". Sowmya Krishnamurthy described it as having ended the popular perception of Drake as the leading figure in hip-hop. In November 2024, Drake initiated legal action against Universal Music Group and Spotify, alleging they had artificially inflated streams of "Not Like Us" through pay-to-play schemes and bots. He withdrew the initial petition on the 14th of January 2025 and filed a full lawsuit in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York the following day, alleging defamation. The suit was dismissed in October 2025, with the court finding the statements at issue to be nonactionable opinion.

• 8. What He Changed

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  Elias Leight, writing for Rolling Stone in 2020, observed that in the era of Take Care, "now nearly every singer raps, and nearly every rapper sings". The template Drake built, incorporating melody into technically complex lyricism and alternating between abrasive rap and softer, sung passages, has been so thoroughly absorbed that its originality is easy to overlook.

  Writers at The Guardian and Rolling Stone both called him "the definitive pop star of his generation" and "perhaps the biggest post-Justin Timberlake male pop star of the new millennium" in 2018. BBC Radio 1Xtra argued that his endorsements pushed the British hip-hop scene toward a wider international audience, in the same way he had elevated the Toronto music scene. Aaron Williams of Uproxx credited him with "jump-starting the sad boy rapper craze alongside Kid Cudi" and renewing American interest in UK grime and Caribbean dancehall.

  Drake popularized the phrase "YOLO" in the United States through his single "The Motto". He introduced the nickname "The Six" for Toronto in 2015, turning a local reference into widely recognized cultural shorthand. In Houston, the 10th of June was declared Drake Day.

  Justin Charity of The Ringer noted that Drake's signature of delivering "half-hearted" performances to achieve a "natural and off-the-cuff" effect became the standard reference point for male R&B singers who followed. His influence was so complete, Charity wrote, that it is "all but impossible to hear certain vintages of R&B without hearing Drake". On the 15th of May 2026, Drake released Iceman alongside two companion albums, Maid of Honour and Habibti, the first time he had released three albums on the same date.