Spotify clapped back at Drake after the rapper claimed that the music streaming platform purposely inflated Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.”
“Contrary to the allegations in the petition, UMG and Spotify have never had any arrangement in which UMG charged Spotify licensing rates 30 percent lower than its usual licensing rates for ‘Not Like Us’ in exchange for Spotify affirmatively recommending [‘Not Like Us]’,” the platform wrote Friday in a legal filing in New York’s state supreme court.
“The Petition claims that an unidentified individual reported on a podcast that he used bots to achieve 30,000,000 streams on Spotify in the first days of the release of ‘Not Like Us.’ Spotify found no evidence to substantiate this claim,” the streamer continued in response.
Spotify’s reply to Drake comes a month after the Canadian artist accused Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) of artificially inflating the numbers for Lamar’s diss track — the Compton rapper’s final shot at Drake during the two’s rap beef over the summer — but not his own music.
Drake’s Frozen Moments LLC accused UMG of launching an illegal “scheme” via methods like bots and payola to inflate the numbers for Lamar’s song that, among other things, accused Drake of pedophilia. Drake’s attorneys stated in the filing that UMG “engaged in conduct designed to artificially inflate the popularity of ‘Not Like Us’ … including by licensing the song at drastically reduced rates to Spotify and using ‘bots’ to generate the false impression that the song was more popular than it was in reality.”
The filing added, “UMG did not rely on chance, or even ordinary business practices. It instead launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves.”
Drake’s attorneys say UMG violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), most commonly used in criminal cases against organized crime. This legal update is especially messy since both Drake and Lamar have spent the bulk of their careers releasing music through UMG.
In a statement to TheWrap, Drake’s legal team at Willkie Farr & Gallagher LLP responded to Spotify’s motion saying, “It is not surprising that Spotify is trying to distance themselves from UMG’s allegedly manipulative practices to artificially inflate streaming numbers on behalf of one of its other artists. If Spotify and UMG have nothing to hide then they should be perfectly fine complying with this basic discovery request.”
