I’ve been listening to Kendrick Lamar’s GNX since he dropped it just before Thanksgiving. It’s a great album, maybe the best album of the year. Kendrick really dominated the year, handily winning his hip-hop battle with Drake, creating one of the biggest hits of the year (“Not Like Us”) and basically doing a victory lap with GNX. Kendrick’s many victories are made sweeter by the fact that Drake has completely lost the plot. Drake could have lost with some kind of dignity, but instead he lied about Kendrick, lied about Kendrick’s partner, lied about Kendrick’s friends, and then Drake refused to just go away for a year and come back with some good music. Just before Thanksgiving, Drake filed legal actions against UMG and Spotify over the rap battle. As in, Drake claims that Universal Music Group (his own label) orchestrated Kendrick’s win and that Spotify helped manipulate Kendrick’s win as well. As in, Spotify and UMG somehow wanted Kendrick to win and take down Drake, and Spotify and UMG are guilty of “allowing” Kendrick’s “Not Like Us” to become one of the biggest hits of the year. Well, it’s taken weeks, but Spotify has finally responded:
Spotify is firing back at Drake’s accusations that the streamer helped Universal Music Group artificially boost Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” calling the allegations “false” and blasting the rapper’s legal action as a “subversion of the normal judicial process.”
The new filing is the first response to a petition filed last month in which Drake accused UMG and Spotify of an illegal “scheme” involving bots, payola and other methods to pump up Lamar’s song — a track that savagely attacked Drake amid an ongoing feud between the two stars. In a motion filed Friday in Manhattan court, the streaming giant says it has found zero evidence to support the claims of a bot attack, and flatly denies that it struck any deal with UMG to support Lamar’s song.
“The predicate of Petitioner’s entire request for discovery from Spotify is false,” the company’s lawyers write. “Spotify and UMG have never had any such arrangement.”
Beyond denying the allegations, the filing repeatedly criticizes Drake for going to court in the first place — calling his claims of a conspiracy “far-fetched” and “speculative,” and questioning why Spotify (a “stranger” to the “long-running fued” between Drake, Kendrick and UMG) is even involved. Spotify also criticized Drake for the way in which he brought his claims to court — not as a full-fledged lawsuit, but as an unusual “pre-action” petition aimed at demanding information. The company accused Drake of using that “extraordinary” procedure because his allegations are too flimsy to pass muster in an actual lawsuit and would have been quickly dismissed.
“What petitioner is seeking to do here … is to bypass the normal pleading requirements … and obtain by way of pre-action discovery that which it would only be entitled to seek were it to survive a motion to dismiss,” Spotify’s lawyers write. “This subversion of the normal judicial process should be rejected.”
In a statement to Billboard later on Friday, Drake’s legal team (from the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher) said: “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.”
As Kendrick said, “You crash out, then you better break the backboard.” As in, you better smash everything to smithereens when you’re crashing out. That’s not what Drake is doing though. I mean, yes, he’s crashing out. But this is just sad. He’s created this highly specific delusion that UMG and Spotify were in cahoots to make one of Kdot’s songs a huge hit, and for what? I don’t understand what Drake thinks the motive would be. It also looks like the biggest delusional cope from Drake, who fundamentally cannot understand why “Not Like Us” struck such a chord (A Minoooooor). As soon as Kendrick dropped the song on a Saturday, it was a MASSIVE hit, a phenomenon which organically became the song of the summer because every single person was singing it.
Photos courtesy of Drake’s Instagram.
