Drake reached his 40th birthday on Saturday, October 24, one day after a new batch of RIAA certifications pushed his US total past 350 million certified units, a level no other artist has reached. The update, dated Friday, October 23, added 30 plaques to his catalog, including diamond status for Views, the album he released the spring he turned 29.
Diamond is the top tier of the US certification system and marks 10 million units. Views now sits alongside Take Care as Drake’s second diamond album. Two songs crossed the same line in the update: the 2011 slow-burner “Marvins Room” and the 2018 hit “In My Feelings.” That gives him 18 diamond songs across lead and featured credits, and 20 diamond titles once the two albums are counted.
Further up the ladder, “God’s Plan” moved to 20 times platinum, sometimes called double diamond, and “One Dance,” his 2016 song with Wizkid and Kyla, climbed to 15 times platinum. Iceman, the solo album he released in May, was certified platinum in the same update, about five months after it arrived.
From $304 to 350 million units
The scale is easier to see against where the Toronto-born rapper, singer and former Degrassi actor started. Three snapshots, ten years apart, tell the story:
- At 20 (2006): he self-released his first mixtape, Room for Improvement. It sold roughly 6,000 copies and paid him $304.04 in royalties. His first concert that August, a half-hour opening slot for Ice Cube at the Kool Haus nightclub, earned him $100.
- At 30 (October 2016): Views was six months old and had already logged 13 weeks at No. 1 on the US albums chart.
- At 40 (October 2026): that same album is diamond, and his certified total has passed 350 million units.
Certified units count streams and downloads as well as physical sales, so the comparison is loose, but the arithmetic is still striking: 350,000,000 divided by 6,000 is about 58,000. In other words, his certified catalog now equals roughly 58,000 runs of that first mixtape. It also took Views roughly ten and a half years, from its April 29, 2016, release to this week, to reach diamond, a reminder that much of the certification count comes from older records still being played every day.
The milestone lands in a strong year on the charts. In May, Iceman, Habibti and Maid of Honour arrived together and took the top three places on the US albums chart at once, a first for any artist. In October, the expanded Habibti (FOMO) edition sent that album to No. 1 on the R&B/hip hop albums chart.
A week of parties in two cities
The celebrations began on Wednesday, October 21, at a private gathering at Toronto’s CN Tower, where friends including Popcaan gave him a collage of photographs. Drake then flew to New York with his mother, Sandi Graham, on his customized Boeing 767, and was seen dining in SoHo on Thursday night.
The main party took place in Manhattan on Friday night, with about 400 guests. The Backstreet Boys appeared as surprise performers and brought him onstage for their 1999 song “I Want It That Way,” a repeat of the duet they first staged at a Toronto stop of their tour in July 2022. The band heads back to his hometown next year, booked for 12 Rogers Centre nights in Toronto next year. Some guests left with Chanel or Hermès handbags, and a game show during the evening offered cash prizes up to $1 million.
Video from the weekend also showed Travis Scott and Future among the guests, two years after the 2024 rap feuds that pitted Drake against several peers. The rapper Loe Shimmy, who appears on Habibti, gave him a Ferrari.
One wish from September is still on the list: he said then that the only present he wanted was a roast from fellow Canadian Jim Carrey.
In a short speech to the room, Drake played down the business side of his year. “I wanted to say thank you,” he said. “Tonight is not about a tour or an album release or a bunch of videos that we shot or a fragrance or a Nike shoe. Tonight is just about being alive, staying alive.”
Further reading
Image: musicisentropy, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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