Artificial Intelligence
Not Allen Iverson
The rap feud between Kendrick Lamar and Drakehas broken out beyond the hip-hop world so that now even the mainstream media is all over it and keeping score, thanks to Lamar winning record and song of the year at the Grammys for his Drake diss track “Not Like Us” and his performance a week later at the Super Bowl Halftime Show.
While it’s unclear how this is all going to play out, music industry label executives know that rap feuds, in general, are good for business — as long as they don’t go too far.
As it is, Lamar’s high-profile performance is landing him the most ink, which in turn is driving plenty of business his way. It’s only five weeks into the year as tracked by Luminate, and already his recorded music catalog is closing in on 1 billion on-demand streams in the U.S., which it will probably reach next week; while his global streams are heading toward 2 billion. As of the week ending Feb. 6, those counts stand at 862.8 million (U.S.) and 1.69 billion (globally), according to Luminate. Overall, Lamar’s catalog has accumulated nearly 664,000 album consumption units in the U.S. in 2025 so far.
That’s nearly three times larger than during the same period in 2024 when Lamar posted 233,000 album consumption units and almost 301 million on-demand streams in the U.S. and global streams of 650 million. Of course, besides his high-profile TV appearances this year, Lamar’s streaming and sales activity is still enjoying an added boost from riding in the afterglow of his recently released GNX album on Nov. 22.
But is all this attention also helping Drake? It’s unclear. Drake is slightly trailing Lamar in terms of U.S. album consumption units and streaming in 2025 so far. Album consumption units came in at 620,000 units, or 7.1% short of the Compton rapper; while his total of nearly 834 million on-demand streams is 3.5% below Lamar’s U.S. total and his global total of 1.529 billion is 10.3% short of his musical rival’s.
Besides that, Drake’s 2025 performance is also down from how his catalog performed in the first five weeks of 2024, when he accumulated 930,000 album consumption units; and, within that, 1.281 billion streams in the U.S. Those 2024 numbers are 50% and 53.6% greater, respectively, than his U.S. activity in 2025 during the same period; while his 2024 global on-demand stream total was 2.246 billion, or nearly 47% greater than this year.
Drake, of course, does not have the added momentum of having released a new album at the end of 2024. (He is releasing his PartyNextDoorcollaborative EP, Some Sexy Songs 4 U, this Friday.) Not only that, his current year’s numbers are competing against his prior year’s numbers which did have that benefit thanks to the afterglow of his eighth studio album, For All the Dogs, which was released on Oct. 6, 2023.
Still, the above numbers do not reflect the impact that Lamar’s Super Bowl performance is having on the activity of his and Drake’s catalogs. Those numbers, for the week ending Feb. 13, won’t be available from Luminate until Monday (Feb. 17).
This is all short-term, of course. Looking at the two artists’ career numbers, Drake swamps Lamar, even though the “Just Like Us rapper” has pretty impressive counts in his own right. Over the past 10 years, Drake has gone toe-to-toe with only Taylor Swift in claiming the title of the biggest artist in the U.S., if not the world, at least as far as recorded music activity goes.
Drake and Lamar’s first commercial releases came out within about a year of each other. Drake’s debut album, Thank Me Later, hit the streets in June 2010, while Lamar’s Section 8.0 album came out in July 2011. Since then, Drake has issued eight albums and Lamar six, and each has also released mixtapes, EPs, collaborations and/or compilations and soundtracks.
By the end of 2024, Drake’s catalog has accumulated nearly 80.7 million album consumption units in the U.S., versus Lamar’s 29.1 million album consumption units, according to Luminate. In fact, the combined activity of just three of Drake’s studio albums alone is higher than Lamar’s total, as each of those albums — Take Care, Scorpion and Views — have garnered slightly over 10 million album consumption units a piece. Meanwhile, Lamar’s best album showings come from his major-label debut good kid, m.A.A.d city, with 9.3 million album consumption units, and DAMN, at nearly 9 million units.
(These career numbers exclude collaborations where most of the collaborators are each considered a primary artist but do include songs where artists are “featured” on a Drake or Lamar song because Luminate credits those songs’ activity to just the primary artist. Album consumption units count each album sale as one album consumption unit; while track equivalent albums, whereby 10 tracks sold equal one album consumption unit; and stream equivalent albums, whereby 1,250 paid subscriber streams equal one album consumption unit, or 3,750 ad-supported streams equal one album consumption unit. Also, Luminate only tracks album consumption units in North America; globally, it only tracks streams and downloads, not album consumption units.)
Within the album consumption unit numbers, Drake’s streaming total in the U.S. is 84 billion and 127 billion globally, as of the Luminate year ended Jan. 2, 2025. Meanwhile, Lamar’s U.S. career streaming total is nearly 29 billion and more than 47 billion globally.
Those numbers are extremely impressive given that 2015 was the first year in which streaming’s impact was widely felt. While huge rock stars, not counting pop artists, are lucky to break the 1 billion on-demand streams milestone in the U.S. each year — and none of them yet appear to have broken the 2 billion mark in the U.S. in a single year — these days, R&B and hip-hop artists regularly hit the multi-billion on-demand stream mark each year — usually led by Drake.
Over the past five years — from 2020 to 2024 — Drake’s U.S. streams have totaled 46 billion, for an annual average of 9.2 billion streams, while globally he’s averaged 15.9 billion streams per year. In contrast, Lamar’s U.S. stream count during that same period averages 3.29 billion, while his annual global count averages nearly 6.4 billion streams. Any way you cut it — by album consumption units or by stream count — Drake’s activity over the course of his career, or even just within the 2020 to 2024 period, is more than twice that of Lamar’s.
So even though Lamar is the top dog this year when measured against Drake’s activity, it remains to be seen if this rap feud changes the dynamics of whose swagger — Drake’s, the reigning champ, or Lamar’s — can be backed up long-term. Only time will tell.
Its over
Last edited:
