“YOLO,” shorthand for “You Only Live Once,” has been splashed all over the Internet and is popping up on T-shirts and other merchandise. Now Drake, 26, claims that he’s entitled to a cut of everyone profiting from the term because he made it popular in his 2011 song, “The Motto.” “You only live once –that’s the motto … YOLO,” he raps on the track.
On Monday, Drake called out a couple of retailers on Instagram for using YOLO. “Walgreens….you gotta either chill or cut the cheque,” he wrote alongside a photo of YOLO emblazoned caps. Then, he posted a pic of Peanuts-themed T-shirts featuring “YOLO” on them hanging on the racks at a department store. “Macy’s…same goes for you,” Drake wrote.
“YOLO” has become so popular that it was one of the finalists for Oxford Dictionaries’ 2012 Word of the Year, but it lost out to GIF. The Washington Post even gives Drake a shout-out in a story that it did in April about its popularity. “The abbreviation has been bouncing around Twitter for a while now, but it cemented its place in cultural conversation when it was written into the Drake song ‘The Motto,'” Maura Judkis wrote.
Still, Drake has a tough battle ahead of him if he plans to take legal action. Gawker reports that “there are over 100 YOLO trademark applications either live or dead in the United States for everything from cologne to dog collars.” Do you think Drake should get paid for YOLO?
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