Drake’s record label files motion to dismiss his lawsuit over Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’
Universal Music Group filed a motion to dismiss Drake’s defamation lawsuit against it, arguing that the Canadian rapper’s claims are “no more than Drake’s attempt to save face for his unsuccessful rap battle” with Kendrick Lamar.
Drake “lost a rap battle that he provoked and in which he willingly participated,” UMG stated in a court filing Monday. “Instead of accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he often claims to be, he has sued his own record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.”
Both Drake and Lamar are signed to UMG, under different divisions. (UMG has no relationship to NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)
The filing comes after a yearlong prolific diss track battle between Drake and Lamar, who spent much of 2024 dropping a slew of tracks aimed at each other. But many fans declared Lamar as the winner of the feud, with “Not Like Us” becoming the bestselling rap recording of 2024. The artist swept this year’s Grammy Awards, taking home five wins, including song of the year and record of the year. Lamar’s momentum continued as he performed at the Super Bowl halftime show in February, where the crowd loudly sang along as he performed “Not Like Us.”
Drake, whose real name is Aubrey Drake Graham, had accused UMG in November of conspiring to “artificially inflate” Lamar’s “Not Like Us” on Spotify, including by using a payola scheme to boost the song with iHeartRadio. Drake and iHeartMedia reached a settlement last month, but his claims against UMG remain active. UMG previously told NBC News that the “suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue.”
In January, Drake sued the record label in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging in an 81-page lawsuit that UMG defamed him by spreading a “false and malicious narrative” when it promoted Lamar’s diss track. Lamar is not named in the lawsuit.
UMG has denied the allegations. In its filing Monday, attorneys for UMG wrote that Drake’s claims are “utterly without merit and should be dismissed with prejudice.”
In response to the filing, Drake’s lead attorney Mike Gottlieb said, “UMG wants to pretend that this is about a rap battle in order to distract its shareholders, artists and the public from a simple truth: a greedy company is finally being held responsible for profiting from dangerous misinformation that has already resulted in multiple acts of violence.”
“This motion is a desperate ploy by UMG to avoid accountability, but we have every confidence that this case will proceed and continue to uncover UMG’s long history of endangering, abusing and taking advantage of its artists,” he added.
In its Monday motion to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit, UMG’s court filing stated that “Not Like Us,” like most diss tracks between the two and throughout rap history, includes a series of “hyperbolic insults.”
“Drake has been pleased to use UMG’s platform to promote tracks leveling similarly incendiary attacks at Lamar, including, most significantly, that Lamar engaged in domestic abuse and that one of Lamar’s business partners and managers is the true father of Lamar’s son,” the court filing stated. “But now, after losing the rap battle, Drake claims that ‘Not Like Us’ is defamatory. It is not.”
It claims that Drake had “goaded” Lamar into continuing the rap battle as well. After taking aim at Lamar in his April 2024 track “Push Ups,” Drake, “seemingly impatient with the time it was taking Lamar to respond,” released his follow-up diss track “Taylor Made Freestyle” on social media. (Drake took down the song after Tupac Shakur’s estate threatened legal action over his alleged use of artificial intelligence to re-create the late rapper’s voice.)
UMG’s court filing stated that Drake “fails to state a claim” for defamation, second-degree harassment and that UMG violated New York General Business Law. It added that he cannot allege that UMG acted with actual malice, the standard of “deliberate or reckless falsification” that public figures must prove in order to win a defamation lawsuit.
The filing noted that diss tracks “are a popular and celebrated artform centered around outrageous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”
UMG also pointed to Drake having signed an open letter in 2022 criticizing “the trend of prosecutors using artists’ creative expression against them” by treating rap lyrics as literal fact.
“Drake was right then and is wrong now,” the record label’s filing stated, adding that his complaint’s “unjustified claims against UMG are no more than Drake’s attempt to save face for his unsuccessful rap battle with Lamar.”
