Drake and screen composer Andrew Lockington each earned five awards at the 36th SOCAN Awards on October 26 at REBEL in Toronto. The results night closed the story this site previewed last week, with more than 600 creators, publishers and industry leaders in the room and Jessie Reyez accepting the SOCAN International Achievement Award.
The SOCAN Awards 2026 winners list is led by two very different kinds of Canadian success. Drake took his sixth SOCAN Songwriter of the Year, Performer award, along with four additional Rap and R&B Music Awards. Lockington matched the five award haul with Screen Composer of the Year, a Most Streamed Film Music Award for Atlas, and honours for his work on Landman, Mayor of Kingstown and Special Ops: Lioness.
SOCAN Awards 2026 Winners Lead With Drake
The headline number is five, and the headline name is familiar. Drake has now won the performer songwriting honour six times, a streak that stretches across eras of his career, from the Take Care years through this spring and the run of Canadian chart records tied to his May releases. The four genre awards underneath it matter just as much for the SOCAN story, because they are performance and airplay based measures of songs that kept working across the year, not a single night of voting.
Lockington sharing the top line is the other half of the SOCAN picture. His scores travel with series and films that shoot in Canada and screen everywhere, and the Atlas streaming honour underlines how much of the modern songwriting economy now runs through screens. A room that can hold Drake and Lockington as co-leaders is a room measuring Canadian music the way audiences actually consume it, songs and scores side by side.
Reyez, Backbone Slide And The Tribute Performances
Jessie Reyez received the International Achievement Award, an honour SOCAN tied to a catalogue that has passed four billion streams worldwide and to writing and collaborations that reached Beyoncé and Eminem. The tribute matched the award: Savannah Ré and Jhyve performed her breakthrough song “Figures” in the room, a full circle moment for a Toronto singer whose own voice carried the original.
The night also honoured the record that started Canadian rap on commercial radio. “Let Your Backbone Slide” by Maestro Fresh Wes, with songwriters Anthony Davis and Peter Davis, received the SOCAN Cultural Impact Award. Released in 1989, it was the first Canadian hip hop single to earn gold status. Rich Kidd, Keysha Freshh and Subliminal closed the show performing it, and this year’s trophies carried the song inside them: the SOCAN trophy’s five bronze crotales were tuned to notes from “Let Your Backbone Slide,” making the award itself a playable instrument.
Music is an expression of a lived experience, and it is valued because it is real. At a time when so much can be manufactured with a click, songwriters and composers continue to choose the harder road: to live and feel, then create music for all of us to enjoy.
That was SOCAN CEO Jennifer Brown, speaking to the room about why the work keeps its value. Around the special honours, Jenna Andrews was named Songwriter of the Year, Non-Performer, Jade LeMac took the Breakout Songwriter Award, Nathan Micay took Breakout Composer, and Peter Peter received the Global Impact Award for Heated Rivalry. Ikky won the Global Music Award, Cris Derksen earned both the Vince Fontaine Indigenous Song Award for “White Gladis 1” and a share of the Jan V. Matejcek New Classical Music Award, and Noeline Hofmann took the Folk and Roots Music Award.
A Hometown Night For Canadian Songwriting
Hosts Andrew Phung and Arisa Cox kept the evening moving at REBEL, a Toronto room that has become a regular home for Canadian music’s industry nights. Shawn Desman and Jamie Fine performed their SOCAN Pop Music Award winning song “BODY,” Hailey Benedict sang “Things My Mama Says,” and Simone Schmidt and Christine Bougie paid tribute to composer Cris Derksen, whose work was honoured twice on the night.
Read together, the results describe a healthy Canadian pipeline. A global superstar leads the winners, a screen composer matches him award for award, a breakout songwriter from British Columbia takes a national honour, and the founding record of Canadian hip hop is treated as a national treasure, literally built into the trophy. For a site that tracks Canadian hip hop history, the line from a 1989 gold single to a sixth songwriter crown for Drake is the story of the night.
The full winners list is published by SOCAN at socanawards.com. Most of the names on it will be back in this site’s coverage within weeks, on tour announcements, chart stories and new releases. The awards simply mark the moment the industry stopped to count what the year had already proved.
