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I'm ashamed to do this. Okay fine, not really. But there is a part of me that can't believe I'm going to the lengths I'm going through to answer the simple question: "What is your favourite Drake song?"
This idea came about when I had the idea of creating a 3TrackSet of my favourite Drake Songs to honour the fact that I've hit my 6th official set on this blog, but of course that proved to be more difficult than I expected. Naturally I could have went to Last.fm or whatever and checked which songs I've played the most, but where's the fun in that?
Instead, in the spirit of March Madness, I've decided to construct a bracket - well multiple brackets with every Drake song available currently on streaming services. This spanned a total of 15 different albums/mixtapes, 13 years, and over 230 songs; a pretty massive undertaking to say the least. Given the fact that I only considered projects on streaming, Drake's first two mixtapes "Room For Improvement" and "Comeback Season" were omitted from consideration but given the fact that Drake was relatively raw and still finding his sound on these two projects, not including them isn't necessarily the biggest crime here. I've decided to call this bracket "Aubrey's Arena".
Initial Setup
Like any tournament, I needed to establish initial seedings for each participant, or in this case; song. To do that in the most fair and non-biased way possible I looked at the amount of streams the song had at the time of writing. Ordering the songs this way and them splitting them off into 6 different brackets gave me a way to set things up quickly and easily without me influencing the initial conditions in any way. Each track in each bracket was then again seeded based on the number of streams meaning that we'd have more popular songs going up against songs that aren't as well known. For example in Group A, top seeded "One Dance" (2.56 billion streams) took on the winner of "When To Say When" (46.5 million streams) and "Girls Love Beyonce" (42.6 million streams).
Ultimately this bracket isn't a popularity contest. If it were the songs making the Elite Eight would be "One Dance", "God's Plan", "In My Feelings", "Passionfruit", "Hotline Bling", "Nice For What", "Nonstop", and "Toosie Slide". These aren't bad songs in any sense, but I'm almost 100% sure no Drake fan would list these songs in this order as their personal favourites. Picking a winner in these matchups is obviously where my preferences come into play, and as you'll see shortly, even this preliminary bracket featured a fair share of upsets where a overwhelmingly popular song loses to a much more obscure track.
Preliminary Brackets
Over the course of an evening, I sat down and went through the 6 brackets that I had set up and carried out the tournament, progressing until I reached the top 8 which produced the following results:
Group A
Notable omissions: "Nonstop", "Controlla", "Fair Trade", "From Time"
Group B
Notable omissions: "Chicago Freestyle", "Mob Ties"
Group C
Notable omissions: "In My Feelings", "To Good", "Knife Talk", "Best I Ever Had", "Legend"
Group D
Notable omissions: "Fake Love", "Portland", "Headlines", "Pop Style", "10 Bands"
Notable omissions: "Jimmy Cooks", "Rich Flex", "Girls Want Girls"
Group F
Notable omissions: "Jumpman", "Way 2 Sexy", "I'm Upset", "Crew Love", "Blem"
Reseeding Into Secondary Brackets
Now that I had my top 8 songs from each bracket, I could once again recombine these remaining songs into one pool, sorting them by streams and then splitting them off into 4 secondary brackets this time. However, this is where I realized I had made a mistake; I forgot to include non-album singles such as "Back to Back", "0 to 100", and "Laugh Now Cry Later" in the initial list. Since I'm lazy and didn't want to redo all initial brackets for a 3rd time, I decided to pick my 6 favourite non-album singles and add them to the massive pool as well.
Splitting this pool into 4 brackets produced 2 groups of 13 and 14 tracks respectively. Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to go through each matchup in these resulting 4 brackets until we narrow it down from 54 songs to a top 16. From there I'm going to re-seed the tracks once again into a final bracket before crowing an overall winner, runner-up and third place song to include in my Drake-inspired 3TrackSet.
Before I wrap things up, I wanted to give a quick breakdown of how each album is represented in the Top 54 based on the number of songs included.
| Album | Songs |
| Take Care | 10 |
| Views | 9 |
| Nothing Was The Same | 9 |
| Non-Album Singles | 6 |
| If You're Reading This | 5 |
| Care Package | 3 |
| More Life | 3 |
| Scorpion | 3 |
| Certified Lover Boy | 1 |
| Dark Lane Demo Tapes | 1 |
| Her Loss | 1 |
| Honestly, Nevermind | 1 |
| Thank Me Later | 1 |
| So Far Gone | 0 |
Which song is going to come out on top? Is Take Care really Drake's best album? Is it Views? Where's your favourite song going to rank or has it already been eliminated? Stick around for the rest of Aubrey's Arena to find out!
Keep it locked to 3TrackSet here, on Instagram, Twitter and TikTok to keep up with the bracket and find out which song is going to be crowned the winner.
Until next time!
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