We thought that the challenge between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the diss of the decade, had ended with the latter's victory. It has only moved (perhaps) to the courtrooms. Yesterday Frozen Moments, the Canadian rapper's company, filed a request: Universal Music Group would have used bots and bribes to inflate the ratings of Not Like Usthe most important piece among those written by Lamar in response to Drake, number one in the United States and nominated for five Grammys, a record for a diss track.
At least for now, this is not a legal action, but a “preventive communication” for information purposes. Furthermore, Drake himself is signed to a label of the Universal group, Republic.
According to lawyers for Drake's company, Universal Music Group engaged in deceptive business practices by organizing a campaign “with the purpose of manipulating and saturating streaming services and airwaves.” According to the Canadian rapper's lawyers, UMG paid to “artificially inflate” the spread of Not Like Us. No names of alleged corrupt people are mentioned, but there would be a whistleblower that the podcast he works for received a bribe for pushing the song.
The whistleblower says he received a payment of $2,500 on May 6, 2024, via the digital payments platform Zelle, from a person associated with Interscope. Again according to this witness, the platform most easily manipulated using bots would be Spotify, which did not have the right security measures in place.
According to the request filed yesterday, corruption and unfair practices concern many media and platforms. Universal allegedly paid Apple to have its virtual assistant Siri “purposely mislead users.” In support of this thesis there is an article by Vibe according to which Siri played Not Like Us when asked to listen to Drake's album Certified Lover Boy.
Universal, the accusers say, also gave money to influencers to push Not Like Us “keeping the payment hidden”. It even goes as far as to say that more than one Universal employee would have been fired because they were loyal to Drake.
The accusations were rejected by a spokesperson for Universal Music Group, who called them “false and offensive”. The group's practices in the fields of marketing and promotion would meet “the highest ethical standards. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments like this can disguise the fact that fans choose the music they want to listen to.”
