According to court documents and media reports on Tuesday, Canadian rapper Drake has brought his battle with competitor Kendrick Lamar to the US legal system, accusing record firm Universal Music of defaming the California hip-hop artist and plotting to inflate his streaming figures.
Lamar, a Pulitzer Prize winner, and Drake, the highest-grossing rapper in the world last year, have been engaged in a heated verbal sparring match for a long time in a genre of music that is notorious for glorifying and obsessing over rivalries amongst its top players.
This year, the alleged “beef” intensified significantly as both men published hateful “diss tracks” disparaging one another.
Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which accused Drake of having relationships with underage girls, enjoyed huge commercial and critical acclaim, exceeding 900 million plays on streaming platform Spotify and earning multiple Grammy nominations, including song of the year.
But in the first of two court filings this week, Drake on Monday accused Universal Music Group (UMG), which distributed the song, of charging Spotify unusually low prices to license the track, in return for the streamer widely recommending the track to its subscribers.
According to a court document filed in New York, Drake also accused UMG of using automated computer “bots” to artificially inflate the supposed number of times the song has been streamed on Spotify.
In a second petition Tuesday, filed in Texas and first reported by music site Billboard, Drake claimed UMG was aware that the song contained “offending material,” but distributed it anyway, without insisting on any changes or edits to its lyrics.
“UMG designed, financed and then executed a plan to turn ‘Not Like Us’ into a viral mega-hit with the intent of using the spectacle of harm to Drake and his businesses to drive consumer hysteria and, of course, massive revenues,” the petition said.
Neither of this week’s legal actions are lawsuits, nor are they formal allegations of fraud or defamation. But evidence collected from both petitions could be used for a lawsuit at a later stage.
