Drake sues Universal Music Group for defamation over Kendrick Lamar's Not Like Us
The move comes a day after Drake's team withdrew a petition against Spotify and UMG
Amid his ongoing feud with Kendrick Lamar, Drake has launched a new lawsuit against his label, Universal Music Group, for defamation and harassment.
The suit, which was filed on Wednesday, alleges the label "approved, published, and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track" with Lamar's diss track Not Like Us, and that the song was "intended to convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile, and to suggest that the public should resort to vigilante justice in response," according to the New York Times.
The new lawsuit comes a day after Drake's team withdrew his November petition against Spotify and Universal Music Group after alleging the companies inflated the numbers of Not Like Us. He claimed the record company, which distributes his and Lamar's music "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."
Last year, Lamar and Drake feuded and dropped diss tracks about each other, with Lamar effectively winning the beef with Not Like Us in May. The track became one of the biggest hits of the year and currently has more than one billion streams on Spotify. It is also nominated at the upcoming Grammy Awards for best rap song and song of the year.
"This lawsuit is not about the artist who created Not Like Us," states the suit. "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."
In May, there was a shooting outside Drake's Toronto home. According to the suit, the rapper attempted to inform the label about the danger caused by Not Like Us — the cover art for the song includes an image of Drake's Toronto house — and pulled his son from school "due to safety concerns." Since then, the suit states Drake "has increased his security team in Toronto and everywhere he goes."
The lawsuit also alleges that the record label "enriched itself and its shareholders by exploiting Drake's music for years, and knew that the salacious allegations against Drake were false" and that Universal Music Group "chose corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists."