Pusha T vs. Drake: Backing up their diss tracks with data
--
There’s probably no need to spend too much time on writing an introduction to this beef between Drake and Pusha T, there was literally no place online that hasn’t been covering this. If you did miss out; the two rappers have beefed years ago, trading shots at each other on tracks like “Exodus 23:1” and “Two Birds, One Stone”. With this new “Infrared” track Pusha T seems to reignite the beef.
Four tracks were released in the past week or so, two by Pusha T and two by Drake, though supposedly the second track released by Drake is an official single and not related to the beef between the two rappers.
After reading their lyrics and cutting through their meanings on genius.com, I thought it would be fun to do some data checks on the shots they are firing at each other.
The data set
As usual, a brief description of all the extracted and gathered data needed in order to do the actual analysis;
- We will need the lyrics of all individual tracks on the previous released albums. Via Genius’ API I was able to extract all lyrics from both Drake and Pusha T’s last 7 albums.
- I want to get an understanding of how their music sounds. We can get this information via Spotify’s API and use their audio features endpoint.
- As some shots have been fired on alleged ghostwriters, I also want to know all associated contributors to the released tracks of these two artists. This information is gathered via genius.com.
Doing an angry-check
There are two lines where Pusha T refers to Drake being angry in his music. The first one refers to Drake’s music being angry for the past couple of years. The second one appears during the outro of Pusha T’s ‘The Story of Adidon’ where he refers to Drake’s new single and him being upset.
Well, enter the angry-check! We can do some investigating via Spotify’s audio features. One of their measures is called the valence score, which is being scaled from 0 (being sad/angry) to 1 (being happy).
Two graphs that are shown below indicate the average valence measures of both artists throughout the years. An average was calculated per album and the year it was released, single tracks that weren’t included onto an album are excluded from this graph.
Drake has an average valence score of 0.35. His album Views scores lowest on this measure with a valence score of 0.27. However, on his latest released album Drake upped his mood, having a higher valence score than the 4 albums prior to More Life. I’m curious to see what score we would get on his forthcoming album.
If we look at Pusha T’s valence scores we see an average of 0.44. His latest release DAYTONA however shows his lowest valence score so far, 0.14 below his average.
It could well be the case that this particular genre just scores low on valence, on average. In order to have an accurate image of these valence scores it would be best to compare these scores with other large Hip Hop artists out there. Therefore I’ve extracted the valence scores of Spotify’s largest Hip Hop playlist RapCaviar, given that this playlist features the largest artists within this genre. It turns out that the average valence score of all tracks included into the playlist is 0.44, slightly higher than the average of the latest releases of both rappers.
Promotional assistance and career reviving
On one of the lines in Drake’s “Duppy Freestyle” he estimates that the extra attention Pusha T’s album DAYTONA is going to get will result in an additional 20,000 units sold. He also mentions that Pusha T’s label, G.O.O.D. Music, can expect an invoice. Drake followed up with posting the invoice on his Instagram.
After doing some Googleing I managed to figure out that the stream equivalent of 1 album sale is 1,500 streams. Meaning Drake claims to be generating an additional 30 Million streams for Pusha T’s new DAYTONA album. Pusha T’s prior album generated 62+ million streams on Spotify so we’ll have to see what the stream counts will be for his latest DAYTONA project which has been out for 9 days now.
So what if G.O.O.D Music is glad that they got the additional promotion for Pusha T and are willing to pay the invoice? Well, according to Digital Music News the estimate amount of payout per audio play on Spotify is $0.00397. If we were to take this information as truthful we can calculated how many streams G.O.O.D music would need to generate in order for them to pay back OVO Sounds (Drake’s label). If we look at three artists on their label we’re seeing some significant monthly listener counts. Kanye West has 26 million monthly listeners whereas Big Sean has 14 million listeners, and Pusha T 5 million.
Assuming that all these listeners were to stream just 2 tracks of these three artists (which probably would be the minimum given two of them released a new album this month) you would already accumulate 90 million streams on a monthly basis. Multiply this amount with the estimate payout per play and you would get $357.000 in revenue for just one month, Spotify only. Though this is just revenue and no royalties are taken into consideration, based on just one month’s worth of Spotify streams, it shouldn’t be too hard to pay that invoice right? ;-)
“My hooks did it, my lyrics did it, my spirit did it, I’m fearless with it”
Both artists are referring to alleged ghost-writers multiple times. Therefore I was curious to know what the amount of writers and producers are per released album. A visualisation below shows a scatterplot with the amount of producers on the y axis and the amount of writers on the x axis.
Another thing to examine when talking about writing lyrics is the Lexical Density; the number of unique words divided by the total number of words (also known as word repetition). I’ve included the lyrics of the last two albums from both artists and looked at the total amount of words and the amount of distinct words (excluding all words with a lower word length than 3 characters).
- Drake has a word count of 14,381 whereas Pusha T has a word count of 6,016 (this is indeed effected by the amount of tracks on an album).
- Of that word count, Drake has 2,793 unique words whereas Pusha T has 2,139 distinct words.
- When calculating the Lexical Density we get a 0.20 score for Drake and a 0.35 score for Pusha T.
- The average word length is 4.44 for Drake and 4.62 for Pusha T.
“Let Steven talk streaming and Shazam numbers”
This one was too hard to resist, having a Pusha T line in his “Infrared” track that actually refers to streaming numbers. However, it will probably be no surprise to you all that Drake is outperforming Pusha T in terms of streaming stats. Since the purpose of this article is to fact-check I did list some differences below.
Drake has 48 Million monthly listeners on Spotify (#1 in the world) whereas Pusha T has almost 6 Million monthly listeners. Pusha T’s listeners might increase over the next month though, given that he released a new album. Drake has 20 Million followers on Spotify, Pusha T has 780K followers. Lastly, since Shazam was mentioned, I also looked at the total amount of Shazams per artists: Drake accumulated over 63 Millions Shazams whereas Pusha T did over 6.7 Million Shazams.
Disclaimer
- This is by no means a way to pick a side, as I like both G.O.O.D. Music and Drake, but just a fun approach to look at this beef between these two artists.
- Spotify is the only streaming service taken into consideration, aside from the total Shazam counts.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed reading this article some 👏🏻 are appreciated.
