Toronto rap superstar Drake is suing his record label, Universal Music Group (UMG), over rival Kendrick Lamar’s diss track Not Like Us.
Drake filed the defamation suit on Wednesday morning in New York City federal court, blaming UMG for publishing and promoting the song, which “falsely accuses Drake of being a pedophile and calls for violent retribution against him.”
Drake and Lamar are both signed to the label.
It comes a day after Drake’s team withdrew his November petition against UMG and Spotify in which he alleged the companies inflated the song’s numbers.
The latest court filing, obtained by the CBC, details multiple break-ins and attempts at Drake’s Toronto home following the song’s release, including an incident in which his security guard was shot.
“During the nearly 30 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, Drake and others laboured to keep the man alive by applying pressure to the gunshot wound with towels. Blood was everywhere,” the filing reads. The suit says nothing like those incidents had happened to Drake or his family in the previous two decades he had been in the public eye.
“They immediately followed, and were proximately caused by, UMG’s actions leading up to and on May 4, 2024,” the filing says, referencing the date Not Like Us was released.
According to the suit, the rapper tried to inform the label about the harm caused by the song — the cover art includes an image of Drake’s house — including having to remove his son from school “due to safety concerns.” It claims Drake was told, however, that he “would face humiliation if he brought legal action.”
Drake says label published false, dangerous allegations
Drake and Lamar’s feud resurfaced in March, with the two rappers exchanging diss tracks before Lamar dropped Not Like Us, in which he calls Drake a “certified pedophile” and a “colonizer” who is appropriating Black hip-hop culture.
The song became the first diss track to reach one billion streams on Spotify and was Apple Music’s No. 1 overall track of 2024. It spent two weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart and is nominated for five Grammy Awards, including song and record of the year.
Drake has claimed that the track’s popularity was not organic, and that UMG took unusual measures to boost its numbers, including the “unprecedented step” of removing its copyright restrictions on YouTube and streaming platform Twitch to ensure content creators would republish it broadly.
Front Burner26:41Drake vs Kendrick and the music industry
Kendrick Lamar’s hit diss track ‘Not Like Us’ accused Drake of being a ‘colonizer’ and a ‘pedophile.’ Now, seven months after the song’s release, Drake has filed a legal petition against Universal Music Group (UMG) for orchestrating a plot to artificially boost the popularity of the song via algorithm manipulation, online bots, and payola, in a bid to undermine him.
Is Drake taking on the music business, in the tradition of Prince and Michael Jackson, or is he a sore loser, seeking litigious retribution for the fact that he lost the most high profile rap beef of all time?
Brian Zisook is a co-founder of the music streaming platform Audiomack, and long time writer and executive in the hip hop world. He joins the show to discuss the facts of Drake’s case, the tradition of hip hop lawsuits that have come before, and the industry practices that created the conditions for this moment.
For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: []
The suit also claims UMG made “significant financial investments” and ran sophisticated publicity campaigns to get Lamar to perform the song at this year’s NFL Super Bowl halftime show, scheduled for Feb. 9 in New Orleans.
UMG had several reasons to boost the track at Drake’s expense, apart from direct financial gain, the suit claims.
UMG’s Interscope Records owns Lamar’s back catalogue, and was incentivized “to prove it could maximize” his sales after recently getting him to enter into a direct licensing agreement, it states.
UMG’s contract with Drake, meanwhile, was nearing its end, and by “devaluing Drake’s music and brand,” it says the label would gain leverage to force Drake to sign a deal that was more favourable to UMG.
“This lawsuit is not about the artist who created Not Like Us,” the suit says. “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.”
CBC has reached out to UMG for comment.
In a previous response to Drake’s legal petitions, a label spokesperson said the “suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue,” and that the company employs “the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns.”
