We also got to differentiate between credited writing and ghostwriting when it come to Drake.
Ghostwriting is where you get paid but no credits. Writing is just out there in the open.
You can go through Drake album credits and spot the tracks where someone else wrote it and got credit.
Take Care for example. Hush is Anthony Palman. Weeknd is Abel Tesfaye. Palman got credit on 11 tracks, don't perform on none. Tesfaye got credits on 5 tracks, perform on 1.
Based on what we seeing with these reference tracks it's safe to assume they wrote almost every track on there.
And this ain't even including the old school definition of a ghostwriter where someone wrote uncredited like Nickelus F.
There’s also another dimension to it that people don’t understand, which is why artists who have “ghostwritten” for artists can deny they have, because technically they’re not ghostwriters at all, and they didn’t intentionally write for someone else…
Credited writers write for and in collaboration with artists.
Ghostwriters write for artists and are not credited.
But a lot of these songs we’re hearing that have reference tracks aren’t “ghostwritten” tracks.
They weren’t written expressly for the artist who ends up performing them.
Often times newer or smaller artists are recording music for themselves, and their music is passed around by engineers, producers, low level executives and A&Rs. Those unfinished demos and songs find their way to bigger artists via those people I mentioned above, and an artist decides they like it enough to buy (or take it) from the artist.
So while everyone is listening to that Vory “reference track” in the pinned thread, it most likely wasn’t a “reference track” at all. It was just a song Vory made
for himself, that someone played for Drake, and Drake decided to buy Vory out of it.
It’s a small technicality, and I know we all like the idea of OVO tents and writers camps, but the reality is a lot more mundane.
