Hi,

Drake is officially in full swing rolling out his new album “ICEMAN” - he hosted another live stream last Friday night accompanied by a new single with Central Cee.

The live stream component of the rollout is an interesting tool designed to capture attention. Let’s explore below.

Let’s dive in ⬇️

On Friday July 25th, Drake released the second single from his “ICEMAN” campaign called “Which One” featuring Central Cee. A few hours earlier, Drake premiered the single on a YouTube live stream on his channel that also featured Central Cee.

The stream took place in the historic Victoria Baths in England, with both Drake and Central Cee participating in the live stream. It was the second live stream of the new album rollout with the first happening on July 4th weekend - Drake drove around Toronto in an ICEMAN truck, live streaming and premiering his new single “What Did I Miss”?

On one hand, the stream builds anticipation for each single and creates the world of ICEMAN - in the first stream, Drake was seen working in an actual icebox and then driving a truck with ICEMAN on the back.

From a marketing perspective, streaming adds a few layers…if Drake were to drop his new single and video with no stream and simply post on social media once and upload to YouTube, while those are noteworthy in their own right, they become singular moments.

“Drake teases new single”.

“Drake drops new single”.

The video goes live, it becomes the center piece of what people are talking about, and then eventually people move on to talk about the next thing.

Live streams generate the ability to create multiple moments and have people talk about multiple events within the same campaign. It’s essentially scaling the conversation online and holding people’s attention for a little bit longer.

For example, in Drake’s first stream, there were multiple moments that made the rounds on the internet and had people talking:

It went from people just talking about Drake releasing a new single, to all of these fractured, little moments that spread across the internet driving conversation and raising attention to his rollout.

The same thing happened in Stream #2:

COMPLEX Music’s Twitter posted about the live stream over 18 times, documenting each moment as it occurred.

18 different posts that essentially took over the Twitter (X) timeline for the night. If you missed the first post, you probably saw the second one. If you missed the second one, you probably saw the third. So on and so on.

It’s the same brilliance with streamers like Kai Cenat, Plaqueboy Max, etc - when Kai Cenat does a stream, that one event (the stream), gets broken down and distributed into tens of moments that get spread across the internet. The fracturing of those moments increases the volume of conversation around that event.

Drake essentially created multiple conversations (streaming with Central Cee, pinnochio, Victoria Baths, etc) out of one event (releasing a new song).

We’re in the attention economy and Drake is playing the game of winning people’s attention and owning the internet.

It’ll be interesting to see how he continues to use this strategy for the remainder of the campaign.

For example, what if for the release week of his album he live streamed for an entire week? It’s no different than what Kai Cenat, Plaqueboy Max, or any other streamers do. They turn their live streams into events that become fractured and spread across the internet in tens or possibly hundreds of micro moments that all come from the same event.

How many micro moments could come out of a full week of being live?

Or Drake live streaming a press run (assuming he does one) and documenting all the little moments that happen throughout his day?

Drake has always been one to understand how to get the internet talking and he’s doing it again via live streaming.

He’s doing a great job at creating conversation, however it’ll be interesting to see if the new music lives up to the hype online. “ICEMAN” is Drake’s first solo project in almost 2 years and many expect it to be one of the biggest album releases of the year. Part of why these live streams work so well for him is because of his superstardom and investment from fans - everything Drake does becomes a moment worth talking about.

Let’s see what happens over the course of the rollout.

Hopefully this was helpful on your journey.

Thanks for reading, until next time.

_{The Vault}

1) The Artist Marketing Playbook - I teamed up with my good friend and fellow music marketing expert Drew De Leon to present The Artist Marketing Playbook. An in-depth look at what an artist can do to set themselves up for success in 2025. More info HERE.