What Drake got wrong — and right — with 100 Gigs

On August 6th , with no prior announcement, Drake unloaded 100 gigabytes’ worth of content, including songs and video clips, to a personal website and directed fans there via his Instagram burner account. But you would not be blamed for missing the memo. Despite Drake being Spotify’s most-streamed artist of all time, and the rapper’s feud with Kendrick Lamar dominating headlines this summer, the massive data dump felt like a drop in the bucket. 

Such is the irony of today’s attention economy. Sure, 100 Gigs drew lots of headlines from music publications (not all of them positive), but a decade ago, a vault like this would have kept audiences occupied for weeks. The gimmick fell flat in today’s everything-everywhere-all-at-once digital world where it is hard enough for people to decide what to watch on Netflix after work. Drake might have had better luck dropping 10 gigabytes — or less. There is irony in the rapper unpacking the file-size equivalent of 100 standard definition movies in one go after his labelhead complained that “merchants of garbage” are clogging up the digital landscape with too much content.

Of course, for an established superstar like Drake, making a big splash may have been beside the point. It certainly seems as if the rapper launched 100gigs.org simply because he could. However, that is a point of debate with his label. Drake claimed that Universal Music Group issued a copyright takedown for his Instagram posts of the three unreleased tracks included on 100 Gigs. A few days later, those songs were made available on streaming services, allowing Drake and UMG to collect revenue from them (at 14.3 million combined Spotify streams and counting). 

In the heat of the Lamar versus Drake feud earlier this summer, MIDiA explained how it reflected bifurcation theory. The music industry is bifurcating into two parallel consumer worlds: the lean-back, passive world of streaming, and the lean-forward, active world of social media. Indeed, the rap battle left streaming on the sidelines, with most releases going to social platforms first and the rippling impacts on music, culture, and fandom happening there as well. 100 Gigs — released entirely outside of the streaming ecosystem until Drake was forced to change that — is another indication that this shift is not just coming from a new generation of creators, but established stars as well. His launch may have fallen flat, but Drake was tapped in enough to know that these days a celebrity’s Instagram burner account with 314,000 followers is the shortcut to culture, not the mainstream platform where tens of millions listen to their music. It was the right path to release, but the wrong content (or at least the wrong size). 

Of course, the challenge — as UMG clearly recognises — is turning social platform cultural clout into revenue. Creators in MIDiA’s April 2024 survey overwhelmingly chose social platforms as the most helpful places to build their fanbases, not music streaming platforms, but the latter is where they are able to monetise (even if in reality many do not meet earnings thresholds and even those who do struggle to earn meaningful income). This is why streaming platforms’ eroding cultural capital is becoming a bigger problem. If these platforms cannot serve artists’ revenue or give them a path into culture, creators will increasingly migrate to social platforms that at least offer them the latter.