Earlier this week, Drake talked to TSN’s sports commentators at the Toronto Raptors game against the Phoenix Suns—and he discussed how his “high volume” album strategy with 2018’s Scorpion is indebted to The Notorious B.I.G.’s double album, Life After Death.

“Notorious B.I.G. put this album out and the ratio of songs versus just important songs was so incredible that I wanted to set a challenge for myself,” he said while seated courtside. “I’ve been doing this for like 10-plus years as well… Sometimes you gotta set a target goal for yourself just to keep it interesting. Last album, I went high volume. I did two sides. It was like 20-something songs, which is a lot of songs.”

However, he doesn’t see his next album matching Scorpion’s hour-and-a-half runtime. “This album, I’ll probably make it more [of a] realistic offering,” he continued. “Something more concise… It could be 10, 11 songs, 16. I also do a lot of different types of music, so it’s tough to make it like a seven song album… I’m having a lot of fun right now making music.”

The OVO Sound founder previously included Biggie’s album in his Instagram Story about the works that inspired Scorpion. Smiley_61st’s Buy. or. Bye, 2Pac’s All Eyez On Me, Booggz’s Tha Suite Life 101, Loski’s Call Me Loose, and Octavian’s “Hands” also made the list.

A few months after Scorpion dropped, Pusha-T took a dig at the trend of extended albums in the streaming age. “The idea of everybody putting like 25 tracks on an album to get the streams up, it’s such a poverty way of cheating to me,” he said in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy. “So I was like, you know what, we need to be totally against everything, and we need to have a whole other mantra in regard to what we’re doing.”

It should be noted that he didn’t mention Drake by name, but the Canadian MC’s fifth studio album does contain exactly 25 songs. However, elongated album lengths became common in the latter half of the 2010s. “Stacking albums with extra songs is a strategic way to achieve certain goals,” Malcolm Manswell, a marketing manager for Atlantic Records, told Rolling Stone earlier in 2018. The additional tracks can generate more streams, which can bump an album’s position further up the Billboard 200.

That year, Migos included 24 songs on Culture II, Rae Sremmurd packed 27 songs onto SR3MM, and Lil Wayne inserted 23 songs on Tha Carter V.

Between 2016’s VIEWS and 2018’s Scorpion, each of Drake’s projects included a minimum of 20 songs. Last year’s Care Package—a compilation of older tracks that didn’t appear on any official projects—included 17 songs.

Prior to Push’s comments about lengthy albums, his feud with Drake went into overdrive when the rivals fired diss tracks at each other with “Duppy Freestyle” and “The Story of Adidon” in May 2018.

Source: Genius.com