Drake withdraws legal petition over Kendrick Lamar diss track | Drake

Drake has withdrawn a legal challenge against his own record label, Universal Music Group (UMG) and Spotify, alleging that they artificially inflated the popularity of a Kendrick Lamar diss track about him.

UMG and Spotify were accused of trying to “manipulate and saturate the streaming services and the airwaves”. The rapper’s lawyers had claimed that UMG paid influencers and radio stations to play the track, Not Like Us, which topped the US charts and proved to be the hammer blow in the Drake-Lamar feud between March and May last year.

It was also alleged that UMG used bots to stream Not Like Us on Spotify in large numbers, “deceiving consumers into thinking the song was more popular than it really was”. UMG was accused of paying Apple “to have its voice-activated digital assistant, Siri, intentionally mislead users to Not Like Us” and had “taken steps in an apparent attempt to conceal its schemes, including but not limited to , by terminating employees associated with or perceived as loyal to Drake”.

Both Drake and Lamar release music through UMG, Drake through Republic Records and Lamar through Interscope.

UMG, which called the allegations “premeditated and absurd”, said: “The suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue.” Spotify also denied the allegations, saying: “Spotify has no financial incentive for users to stream Not Like Us over any of Drake’s tracks.”

The filing was not a lawsuit, but a request for documents in preparation for a potential lawsuit.

In New York court documents seen by The Guardian, Drake has now withdrawn that request, saying: “Petitioner hereby voluntarily terminates this special proceeding for all respondents at no cost to any party.”

Drake previously filed another petition in Texas, claiming that UMG paid radio group iHeartRadio to play Not Like Us, and that UMG allowed the release of the track despite knowing it contained allegations that Drake was a “certified pedophile”, which Drake denied. This petition remains active.

After several diss tracks from each rapper, Lamar was generally considered the winner. Not Like Us, which also claimed that Drake was a “colonizer” seeking from the hip-hop scene, scored the highest one-day and week-long streams of any rap song on Spotify.

Drake has released relatively little music since the feud: four tracks in August, plus two appearances on Camila Cabello’s album and another with the Mexican-American group Fuerza Regida. But he returned to solo material earlier this month with the freestyle Fighting Irish, which looked back on the Lamar feud and friendships lost over it.

“The world fell in love with the gimmicks, even my brothers got tickets / Seemed like they loved every minute / Just know this shit is personal to us and it wasn’t just business… I was wrong sadly, loyalty was not a given ”, he rapped. He also referenced the “colonizer” charge, rapping “I’m starin’ at my daddy” — Drake’s father is African-American.