He started from the bottom, now he’s… f***ing here on the whole FC Barcelona men’s team’s shirts. Yes, Drake is one of the first artists to benefit from Spotify flexing the muscles of its sponsorship of the Catalan football giant.
This Sunday (16 October) FC Barcelona will take the field for the ‘El Clásico’ match with Real Madrid in a kit emblazoned with Drake’s OVO Sound logo.
Drake unveiled the shirt in a post to his 122 million Instagram followers this morning, with the OVO Sound owl giving Music Ally’s football-nerd division immediate flashbacks to classic Sheffield Wednesday club crests.
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In fact, there’s a long historical lineage of musical shirt-sponsorships: Wet Wet Wet and Clydebank FC; Jake Bugg and Notts County; dance label Skint and Brighton and Hove Albion; and most recently Ed Sheeran and Ipswich Town being just a few of them.
Still, the Drake promo – angled around his 50bn streams milestone on Spotify – is the biggest such example yet, and a statement of intent by the streaming service following its lucrative sponsorship deal with FC Barcelona.
At an event to brief journalists on the plans earlier this week, Spotify’s VP partnerships Marc Hazan hinted at the desire to explore half-time shows or bringing artists into the stadium, while Spotify also confirmed that the FC Barcelona women’s team features in its plans – albeit with nothing yet ready to talk about publicly.
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