“UMG did not rely on chance, or even ordinary business practices,” Drake’s lawyers said in a statement. “It instead launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves.”
Some language from the filing includes allegations that UMG charged Spotify significantly lower licensing rates in exchange for recommending the song to users even if they were searching for “unrelated songs and artists.” There are also claims of UMG conspiring with paid influencers to amplify the track on social media sites.
Drake is, of course, on UMG himself—for the last five years or so he’s been boasting in his raps about receiving an unreported, unprecedented advance directly from Universal CEO Lucian Grainge to the tune of $400 million. Why then, would UMG back Kendrick instead of the cash cow they already invested nine figures into? Drake’s suit blames Interscope, the UMG subsidiary that licenses Kendrick’s music. ““UMG’s schemes were motivated, at least in part, by the desire of executives at Interscope to maximize their own profits,” Drake’s attorneys said in a statement. “Executives at Interscope have been incentivized to maximize the financial success of Interscope through the promotion of ‘Not Like Us’ and its revitalizing impact on the artist’s prior recording catalog.”
Again, this is a pre-action petition filed for information gathering first, so we’ll see if this actually moves forward.
January 15, 2025: Drake officially goes throw with his lawsuit
Welp, it took nearly two months, but Drake is indeed moving forward. On January 14, Drake and his lawyers withdrew the petition that alleged Universal Music Group and Spotify colluded to boost the streams and popularity of “Not Like Us,” just to go ahead with a full-fledged lawsuit a day later suing UMG for defamation. “UMG intentionally sought to turn Drake into a pariah, a target for harassment, or worse. UMG did so not because it believes any of these false claims to be true, but instead because it would profit from damaging Drake’s reputation,” the suit reads.
Basically, Drake, through the complaint, is accusing his own label of using “Not Like Us” as a tool to devalue his brand, and thus make his looming contract renegotiation more malleable to their interests—losing a rap beef, facing lower standing in the hip-hop world, and fending off the incendiary allegations the song levies at him would theoretically force Drake to accept a lower number than he might otherwise demand.
The suit goes to great lengths to paint a picture of the harm “Not Like Us” has caused Drake, even citing the shootings and intrusions at his Toronto estate—which were previously believed to be more associated with Drake’s beefs with The Weeknd and his associates—as being spurred by the public buying into the song labeling him as a dangerous pedophile.
Crucially, the suit goes out of the way to say that Kendrick himself is not a part of the complaint: “This lawsuit is not about the artist who created ‘Not Like Us.’ It is, instead, entirely about UMG, the music company that decided to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations that it understood were not only false, but dangerous.”
February 4, 2025: Drake’s first tour post-beef leans into his loss
Even though the actual war-of-words in this rap beef ended in May 2024, somehow the real eye of the storm for Drake is the seven-day stretch between “Not Like Us” sweeping its categories at the Grammys on February 2nd—including wins for Record and Song of the Year, only the second time a rap song has ever won those categories—and Kendrick’s looming halftime show performance at Super Bowl LIX. Two days after the Grammys, Drake kicked off his Anita Max Wynn tour in Australia by leaning into a down-but-not-out narrative, taking the stage in a hoody designed to look as if it had been hit with more bullets than Sonny Corleone took at the tollbooth. And just in case it went over any heads, the back of the hoody was somehow rigged to feature smoke billowing out of the bullet holes on Drake’s back.
