Amid an ongoing battle royal with hip-hop icon Kendrick Lamar, Canadian rapper Drake now claims their shared record label secretly gamed the system to artificially inflate his avowed rival’s most recent diss track, in which Lamar accuses the former child star of being a “certified pedophile,” while suppressing his own music.
In an eyepopping court filing obtained by The Independent, Drake, born Aubrey Drake Graham, says Universal Music Group (UMG) used a network of bots, in conjunction with a so-called pay-to-play scheme, to “manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves” with Lamar’s smash hit song “Not Like Us,” all to Drake’s detriment.
The filing accuses UMG, which has deals with both performers, of paying Spotify to recommend “Not Like Us” to users “who are searching for other unrelated songs and artists,” claiming the label also paid Apple to have Siri “purposely misdirect” users requesting songs from Drake’s catalog, serving up “Not Like Us” in its place. UMG’s ploy, the filing argues, created “the false impression that the Song was more popular than it was in reality.” Making matters even stickier, Drake says in the filing that UMG has tried to hide its alleged propping up of Lamar at Drake’s expense “by terminating employees associated with or perceived as having loyalty to Drake.”
According to the filing — a petition by Drake and his company, Frozen Moments LLC, asking the court to order UMG and Spotify to preserve all relevant documents and communications in advance of a pending lawsuit — UMG has so far “refused to engage” with Drake over the issue, instead pointing the finger at Lamar and telling Drake to sue Lamar, not UMG.
But a source from Drake’s camp said on Monday, shortly after the petition was filed in New York State Supreme Court, that Drake is upset with UMG’s allegedly shady business practices, not Lamar or his lyrics. (Drake has hit back at Lamar with his own tracks, calling the Compton rapper a domestic abuser and casting doubt on the paternity of his child.) Further, the source told The Independent, if Drake is successful at tamping down wrongdoing throughout the industry, the result could help protect other, less well-known artists from future exploitation.
In an email, a UMG spokesman said, “The suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear.”
Spotify declined to comment. The attorneys representing Drake declined to comment on the record for this story.
UMG was one of Spotify’s earliest supporters, inking a multi-year global licensing agreement with the streaming giant in 2020, Drake’s court filing states. It cites UMG’s financial reporting, which showed some $2.3 billion in earnings from Spotify in 2023, accounting for nearly 20 percent of the label’s revenues.
In May of this year, with streaming so important to its bottom line, UMG “did not rely on chance, or even ordinary business practices,” to achieve success with Lamar’s latest release, according to the filing.
“It instead launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, ‘Not Like Us,’ in order to make that song go viral, including by using ‘bots’ and pay-to-play agreements,” the filing states, claiming UMG charged Spotify 30 percent less than its usual licensing rates in exchange for Spotify pushing recommendations for “Not Like Us” to “users who are searching for other unrelated songs and artists.”
“Neither UMG nor Spotify disclosed that Spotify had received compensation of any kind in exchange for recommending the Song,” the filing contends, claiming that such practices contravene the Communications Act of 1934.
In June, a “whistleblower” revealed on a podcast that Lamar’s label had paid him to set up a bot network that would generate 30 million streams on Spotify in the first few days after the May 3 release of “Not Like Us,” according to the filing. The leaker claimed he had been promised a cash payment plus a percentage of the song’s sales in exchange for his help. The filing says UMG also paid to quietly “inflate” the number of views Lamar’s “Not Like Us” video received, paid traditional radio stations for extra airplay, and claims the label’s alleged under-the-table streaming deals extended beyond Spotify.
“Online sources reported that when users asked Siri to play the album ‘Certified Loverboy’ by recording artist Aubrey Drake Graham d/b/a Drake, Siri instead played ‘Not Like Us,’ which contains the lyric ‘certified pedophile,’ an allegation against Drake,” the filing states.
UMG, additionally, paid social media influencers to “promote and endorse” Lamar’s song, without either side disclosing the financial arrangement, according to the filing, which says the arrangement generated nearly 900 million streams on Spotify for “Not Like Us,” a record for the most streams ever in a single day for a hip-hop song, and the most-streamed diss track in Spotify history. The song was also a massive hit on radio, and became the best-selling rap song of 2024, the filing states. The motivation behind UMG’s “schemes,” according to Drake’s filing, was entirely financial. It claims the colossal success of “Not Like Us” has, in turn, juiced sales of Lamar’s back catalog, making even more money for UMG.
Drake’s filing even alleges that he has “received information that UMG has been taking steps in an apparent effort to conceal its schemes, including, but not limited to, by terminating employees associated with or perceived as having loyalty to Drake.”
“Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game,” the filing concludes. “Every time a song ‘breaks through,’ it means another artist does not. UMG’s choice to saturate the music market with ‘Not Like Us’ comes at the expense of its other artists, like Drake.”
Last month, nu-metal band Limp Bizkit sued UMG, claiming the label has not paid them despite their songs being streamed more than half a billion times.
Drake is accusing UMG and Spotify of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), as well as the NY Deceptive Business Act and the NY False Advertising Act.
