Denise Belfon has been waiting nearly three decades to get paid for one of the most sampled vocals in Caribbean music history, and she says it took Drake’s team to finally make it happen. The Trinidadian soca legend says the Canadian superstar’s camp helped untangle a long-running rights dispute over “Work,” the soca classic she recorded in the 1990s, and ensured she would start receiving royalties whenever the track gets sampled going forward.
For Belfon, this is a story that has been unfolding in the background for years while her voice kept showing up in other people’s records. She says disputes over the rights to the recording left her cut out of the financial rewards that should have come with the song’s lasting reach, even as “Work” kept finding new audiences and new uses across multiple eras of popular music.
What makes Drake’s involvement interesting is that his most consequential move here had nothing to do with music. His team reportedly helped sort out the ownership situation on the back end, the kind of administrative and legal untangling that rarely makes headlines but can mean everything to an artist who has been watching their work generate money for others.
Belfon is not treating this as a closed chapter, though. She has made clear she is still actively pursuing backpay connected to the many recordings that sampled her vocals before the royalty situation was resolved, which means this could grow into a much larger rights dispute than what has been settled so far.
That dimension of the story matters beyond Belfon’s individual case. Caribbean music has spent decades feeding into global pop, hip-hop, and dancehall crossovers, with vocals and rhythms from the region becoming valuable raw material for international hits. The artists behind those original recordings have not always seen the financial returns that follow, and the legal frameworks around sampling have not always worked in their favor.
Soca, reggae, and dancehall have each had moments where a decades-old recording suddenly becomes the most recognizable part of a chart-topping song, and the conversation about who profits from that rarely starts with the original performer. Belfon’s situation fits a pattern that producers, rights advocates, and Caribbean music industry figures have been raising for years.
There is also something worth sitting with in the timeline here. Belfon recorded “Work” in the mid-1990s, and her voice has been circulating through music ever since, crossing borders and genres while the paperwork struggled to keep up. The fact that it took until now, and required the intervention of one of the biggest-selling artists on the planet, to get the royalty pipeline moving says something about how the system has worked for artists in her position.
Drake’s team has not made any public statement about their role in the situation. The details of exactly how the rights were resolved and what the royalty structure looks like going forward have not been fully disclosed.
What Belfon has made clear is that the forward-looking piece is sorted, and the backward-looking fight is still very much alive.
