Spotify Is Sorry for Over-Promoting Drake’s New Album

Drake dropped his really, really long (and let’s be honest here—not all that good) double album Scorpion last Friday. People knew that the album was coming, but Spotify really wanted us to know. Drake took over seemingly every playlist on the Spotify homepage, with header titles as clever as “Thank God, It’s FriDrake,” to the dismay of many a user.

what’s cool about streaming music is it offers infinitely more choices than homogeneous radio playlists pic.twitter.com/nSc3RfCn2V

— Al Shipley (@alshipley) June 29, 2018

Spotify got so into what they called #ScorpionSZN that they even put Drake’s face on editorial playlists that didn’t feature his music, “Best of British,” “Happy Pop Hits” and “Massive Dance Hits” among them. Spotify is that person on Instagram who gets a significant other and posts a photo of them every 10 minutes.

The streamer’s quirky promotional technique backfired pretty quickly, though, when some users complained about the promotion on their ad-free accounts and began demanding refunds. As Stereogum points out, Reddit user SchwagSchwag posted a complaint online and apparently received a refund for a month’s payment after speaking to customer service.

Spotify will refund you, if you see a lot of Drake on the app pic.twitter.com/6sHqNzjpzg

— dudey (@notkaranarora) July 2, 2018

For some, the promotion may seem reminiscent of that time in 2014 when Apple uploaded U2’s Songs of Innocence to everyone’s libraries even though no one asked for it. Naturally, Spotify users took to Twitter to express their frustrations.

Me: I’m looking for some good music..

Spotify: How about Drake?

Me: Eh.. Kinda in the mood for something else..

Spotify: Ok, so Drake?

Me: No, listen I just..

Spotify: DRRRAAAKKKEEEEE pic.twitter.com/N4T7eqCwFA

— tanner (@tanncap) June 29, 2018

The promo clearly worked for some people, though: Scorpion broke one-week streaming records in only three days and the album now has over 435 million on-demand streams.