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Nothing says you lost the rap beef like hiring a team of lawyers to argue that the track that broke streaming records and earned five Grammy nominations in the process of humiliating you wasn’t actually that popular.
But according to attorneys for Drake’s company Frozen Moments LLC, the song widely credited as the knock-out punch in his feud with Kendrick Lamar—titled “Not Like Us,” which Lamar released in May—owes its success not to genuine love from fans but to a corporate scheme involving Spotify bots and payola.
In a petition filed Monday in Manhattan supreme court, Frozen Moments asked a judge to order Spotify and Universal Music Group, which owns Lamar’s record label Interscope, to preserve evidence of the alleged scheme in anticipation of a possible lawsuit.
The filing claims Universal Music Group “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves with a song, ‘Not Like Us,’ in order to make that song go viral, including by using ‘bots’ and pay-to-play agreements.”
The song, among other scathing lines, suggests that Drake is a pedophile.
Frozen Moments claims that Universal Music Group took a number of steps to unfairly boost the popularity of “Not Like Us,” including charging Spotify a reduced licensing rate for the song in exchange for the streaming company recommending it to users who searched for other music. The company also alleges that Universal Music Group paid Apple to configure its Siri voice assistant to play “Not Like Us” to users who asked Siri to play Drake’s album “Certified Loverboy” and that it paid radio stations and influencers to promote the song without disclosing that they were being compensated for doing so, an illegal practice known as payola.
The petition also accuses Universal Music Group of conspiring with “unknown parties” to use bots to artificially inflate the popularity of “Not Like Us” on Spotify. Frozen Moments’ attorneys cite a video on the YouTube channel of creator Jambisco Don in which an alleged hacker claims to have operated a bot network to boost the song on behalf of Lamar’s label.
Upon its release, “Not Like Us” broke Spotify’s single-day streaming record, surpassing Drake’s 2021 song “Girls Want Girls.” It went on to become the fastest hip-hop song to reach 300 million streams on Spotify and has been streamed more than 914 million times. It was also nominated for five Grammy awards in the categories Record of the Year, Song of the Year, Best Rap Performance, Best Rap Song, and Best Music Video.
The petition says that Frozen Moments is preparing a civil lawsuit that could accuse Universal Music Group and Spotify of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), a law often associated with mob prosecutions. It asks the court to order the defendants to disclose documents and communications related to the alleged scheme in preparation for such a suit.
