Drake Drops UMG, Spotify Legal Action Over ‘Not Like Us’
Drake has withdrawn his legal petition against Universal Music Group (UMG) and Spotify after accusing the companies of colluding to discount the streaming licensing rates on Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” in exchange for increased audibility.
In a New York filing on Tuesday obtained by Rolling Stone, Drake’s company Frozen Moments voluntarily withdrew his pre-action filings against UMG and Spotify, which included an “Order to Show Cause seeking pre-action disclosure and preservation of certain documents and communications” from UMG and “pre-action disclosure of certain documents and communications” from Spotify. (On the following day, Wednesday, Jan. 15, Drake filed a federal defamation and harassment lawsuit against UMG).
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Representatives for Drake, UMG, and Spotify did not immediately respond to inquires regarding the rapper’s recent filing.
Drake’s attorneys made a pair of legal filings in November stating their intent to investigate if UMG worked with Spotify and iHeartRadio to artificially boost the popularity of Lamar’s Drake-aimed diss track. The filings also claimed on “information and belief” that bots and other forms of payola were utilized to inflate the song’s streams and that Universal was complicit in “defamation” by supporting a song that accused Drake of being a “certified pedophile.”
“Spotify has no economic incentive for users to stream Not Like Us over any of Drake’s tracks,” a spokesperson for the streaming service said following the allegations. Spotify filed an opposition brief to Drake’s petition, stating that it “should be denied.”
“Under cover of the far-fetched contention that this gives rise to a civil RICO claim, Petitioner in this proceeding seeks to invoke the extraordinary remedy of pre-action discovery,” the opposition brief read. “On this basis, Petitioner seeks pre-action discovery of documents sufficient to show any such agreement and the financial benefits allegedly received. As set forth in the accompanying affirmation, the predicate of Petitioner’s entire request for discovery from Spotify is false: there is no such agreement.”
This article was updated with a link to the story on the new federal lawsuit filed on Jan. 15.
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