It’s a new year with the same beef. On Wednesday, Drake upped the ante of the Great Rap War by filing a federal lawsuit against his label, Universal Music Group (UMG), for defamation and harassment for their support of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.” UMG also distributes Lamar’s music through Interscope Records. Among the many claims in the lawsuit, Drake’s lawyers allege UMG “whitelisted” Lamar’s diss track in order for popular content creators to amplify the song on their pages.
On Jan. 14, just a day prior to filing the defamation and harassment complaint, Drake withdrew his previous pre-action paperwork against UMG and Spotify, accusing the two of colluding to illegally and artificially enhance the listenership of “Not Like Us.” The new suit, filed in the Southern District Of New York on Jan. 15, requests a jury trial as it alleges that UMG “unleashed every weapon in its arsenal” to make Kendrick’s song a “viral hit” despite its alleged intention to “convey the specific, unmistakable, and false factual allegation that Drake is a criminal pedophile.”
The 81-page complaint obtained by Rolling Stone claims that UMG went to several unprecedented lengths to ensure the popularity of “Not Like Us,” whose most-famed lyrics include “Say Drake, I heard you like ‘em young,” “Certified Lover Boy? Certified pedophiles,” and the double-entendre “Tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A-Minor.” The crux of the defamation accusation relies on Drake’s claim that UMG knew that those assertions were untrue and pushed the song with an “unrelenting campaign” anyway. In turn, the suit claims, his reputation and security have been repeatedly harmed.
A spokesperson for the label retorted in a statement that the company would never set out to hurt its own artist. “Throughout his career, Drake has intentionally and successfully used UMG to distribute his music and poetry to engage in conventionally outrageous back-and-forth ‘rap battles’ to express his feelings about other artists,” the statement said. “He now seeks to weaponize the legal process to silence an artist’s creative expression and to seek damages from UMG for distributing that artist’s music.”
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Part of UMG’s campaign, Drake alleges, included paying the NFR Podcast to promote the song without disclosure. The suit also claims UMG harmed Drake when it made the song available for widespread circulation from content creators by removing its copyright restrictions on YouTube and Twitch, a process known as “whitelisting.” The suit claimed UMG went against its own “formal ban” on whitelisting, allowing content creators to play the song in its entirety in monetized videos. In contrast, creators would typically not get paid if they used copyrighted material in their clips.
The whitelisting, the suit argues, “was done purposely and with the full knowledge of UMG for the purpose of spreading the Recording, and its defamatory content, as broadly as possible and as quickly as possible.” While there has been a barrage of reaction videos online throughout the entirety of Kendrick Lamar and Drake’s rap battle (one in which Drake also claimed Lamar was violent with his romantic partner Whitney Alford and that his business partner may be the real father of one of his children with her), the suit names five popular platforms in particular as having greatly benefited from the whitelisting.
Zias — a streamer implicated in the lawsuit whose music reaction content has earned him nearly 5 million YouTube subscribers — invited me on to his Jan. 15 broadcast to comment on the news. His “Not Like Us” reaction video from last spring has earned 6.6 million views since. Zias first responded to the suit on X with a three-second meme of mystified characters saying, “Huh?” Wait, what?” “Huh,” “Woah,” “What?” in rapid succession. Though the complaint reports that Drake does not believe UMG has ever whitelisted a song on any platform before “Not Like Us,” Zias disputes that.
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“UMG has whitelisted a lot of our videos at my request,” he says. Zias says that he reached out to a representative of UMG’s subsidiary Interscope to ask that “Not Like Us” be whitelisted for his personal use, and to his understanding, the song was not initially whitelisted across YouTube in general. He also says that other creators reached out to his Interscope contact as well. “There might’ve been a decision at some point on their end to let creators monetize the video after seeing the reception,” Zias says. “I don’t know. But I know from our end, that wasn’t the case.”
Though he was uncertain, Zias thinks Drake’s first Kendrick diss in the series, “Push Ups,” had also been whitelisted. UMG has not responded to Rolling Stone’s request for comment on that matter.
Nevertheless, Zias and his co-host B. Lou say their “Not Like Us” reaction video was only monetized for less than a week. Though he declined to go into specifics, Zias says he knows exactly how much money he made from covering the beef as a whole but not from “Not Like Us” in particular. “It was fruitful,” he says. “It was a lot. I think everybody could attest to that. Everybody ate from that situation.”
However, both Zias and B. Lou reject the notion that monetization incentivized their reaction to the song. Zias has posted reaction videos to Drake’s “Family Matters” and “The Heart Part 6,” which are still available as well. “It wouldn’t have made a difference in our reaction because, in the reaction community, we react regardless of it getting copyrighted or not,” he says. “Nobody was going to be like, ‘Oh, they letting us make money from it. Let’s react a certain way.’”
Zias, like many, finds Drake’s legal claims illogical. He says that he’s remained a Drake fan throughout the battle. “I still fuck with Drake[‘s] music as an artist. I still fuck with Kendrick as an artist. Even outside of the beef, it didn’t make me want to not listen to Drake,” he says. B. Lou, though, noted that being evoked in the lawsuit may turn some of their own audience against them: “What if some of his fans that rocked with us, 1737049805 that they saying we reacted a certain way for some bread — now they’re like, ‘Oh, well we ain’t rocking with them no more.’” B. Lou also feels some dissonance towards Drake. “I was still rocking with Drake,” he says. “That kind of rubbed me the wrong way a little bit.”
No Life Shaq — another one of the creators named in the suit as having earned 5.3 million views on YouTube for his “Not Like Us” reaction video — posted a 10-minute long reaction to being called out in the filing. “This nigga Drake done snitched on the reaction community!” he said loudly. “Nigga we chillin’, having fun, and you got us listed in a case? This gotta be the softest nigga ever, dog.” He called Drake a great artist but “not hip-hop” and also insisted that whether or not they could monetize their “Not Like Us” reactions, he and his peers would have still shared their takes on “the biggest beef ever.” He also pointed out that the suit only named creators with large followings. “If you gon’ put some of us, you gotta put all of us,” he said. No Life Shaq did not respond to Rolling Stone’s request for further comment.
Other creators named in the suit had quicker but equally bewildered responses. CartierFamily expressed a similar disbelief on X by writing, “Woah we are mentioned in a Drake lawsuit??” with three laughing emojis. Last year, the group of four YouTubers shared a reaction to “Not Like Us” that currently sits at 2 million views. However, CartierFamily’s more recent content mostly consists of Trump support and conservative commentary. Rolling Stone has sent requests for comment to all the creators named as benefiting from whitelisting, as well as NFR Podcast.
Experts, including two lawyers, told Rolling Stone that they believe Drake’s litigation against UMG and others after a resounding defeat in last year’s battle will ultimately be unproductive. “I think it is in everyone’s best interest that this does not move forward,” said Brian “Z” Zioosk, co-founder of the streaming service Audiomack. “The fact that it happened at all undeniably is going to damage Drake’s reputation even more than he has experienced over the last 12 months.”
