Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” Spotify Streams Jump by 430 Percent Following Super Bowl Halftime Show
Kendrick Lamar’s crowd-pleasing Super Bowl halftime show certainly made viewers want to listen to more of the rapper’s music as his Spotify listenership increased drastically after Sunday night’s performance.
The Grammy Award-winning rapper’s diss track-turned-cultural moment “Not Like Us” had his biggest boost of the night with an increase of 430 percent in the three hours following Lamar’s halftime performance, the streamer said Monday morning.
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The song was one of many to see renewed interest: Lamar’s streaming overall jumped by 175 percent. “Humble” saw an increase of 300 percent, while his duet with SZA, “All the Stars,” jumped 290 percent. SZA herself experience an 80 percent increase in streaming numbers.
The GNX rapper performed several of his recent hits, including “squabble up,” “DNA,” “euphoria,” “man at the garden,” “peakboo,” “luther” and “tv off.” During the performance, Lamar teased that he wanted to “play their favorite song, but you know they love to sue” — a reference to the Drake diss track “Not Like Us” and the current lawsuits surrounding the song. He decided against it in the moment, instead slowing it down and brining out Grammy Award-winning singer SZA before eventually going back to the song.
Fans had been speculating whether or not Lamar would perform “Not Like Us” during the NFL’s biggest stage. The critically acclaimed song, released amid an ongoing feud with rapper Drake, is one of several diss tracks the rapper released against the Certified Lover Boy artist, including “euphoria,” which he also performed.
Sticking to the song’s original lyrics, Lamar called out Drake by name. He noticeably skipped over the use of “pedophiles” in the song but had the entire stadium screaming “tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A minor” at full volume.
“Not Like Us” was one of 2024’s biggest hits, spending two weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 and 20 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot Rap Songs chart. The song won all five of the Grammy Awards for which it was nominated, including song and record of the year, transcending a simple diss track and becoming an international and cultural anthem. The song recently crossed more than a billion streams on Spotify and was inducted into the streamer’s Billions Club.
“Not Like Us” is at the center of a defamation suit from Drake against Universal Music Group, the parent record label to which he and Lamar are both signed. The new lawsuit claimed UMG “approved, published and launched a campaign to create a viral hit out of a rap track” that 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.”
In November, Drake’s Frozen Moments company filed a petition in a New York court alleging that UMG “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.” Both Spotify and UMG refuted the claims, with the record label saying the allegations were “offensive and untrue.”
“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’], including ‘to users who are searching for other songs and artists,’” the streamer said in a statement following the petition.
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