In a court document, Universal Music Group (UMG) is asking for the dismissal of Drake’s federal defamation lawsuit against the label over Kendrick Lamar’s hit song “Not Like Us,” claiming that the rapper “lost a rap battle that he provoked” and that the action is a “misguided attempt to salve his wounds.”
In a brief dated Monday, UMG made the startling remarks, requesting that a judge dismiss Drake’s January defamation case.
According to the complaint, “he has sued his record label in a misguided attempt to salve his wounds… rather than accepting the loss like the unbothered rap artist he frequently claims to be.”
Republic Records, a branch of UMG, currently represents Drake, while Interscope Records, another UMG company, currently represents Lamar, who is not specifically mentioned in the case.
Mike Gottlieb, Drake’s principal lawyer, described UMG’s request as a “desperate ploy” to “avoid accountability” in a statement released on Tuesday, March 18, 2025.
The statement said, “UMG wants to feign that this is about a rap battle to divert 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.”
The dispute is a result of Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s spat from the previous year, in which they exchanged more intimate and unsubstantiated insults in a number of lyrics.
The complaint primarily concerns the song “Not Like Us,” wherein Lamar asserted that Drake was a “certified paedophile,” a charge the Canadian rapper refutes.
Since Lamar’s number-one diss single “clearly conveys nonactionable opinion and rhetorical hyperbole,” the label contended that Drake’s complaint should be dismissed since it wasn’t defamatory.
The petition stated, “Diss tracks are a well-known and cherished art form based on ludicrous insults, and they would be severely chilled if Drake’s suit were permitted to proceed.”
Additionally, Drake “had no concerns using UMG’s platform to publish slurs about Lamar during their rap feud,” including unverified allegations of domestic violence, according to the label’s attorneys.
A copy of the pre-action petition that Drake filed in November, which came before his defamation lawsuit, claims that UMG “conspired” to artificially promote Kendrick Lamar’s song “Not Like Us” on Spotify. CNN was able to secure a copy of the petition.
Lamar is not charged with any misconduct in the petition.
Drake stated in it that UMG “launched a campaign to manipulate and saturate the streaming services and airwaves” with Lamar’s song “to make that song go viral,” and that the company employed “pay-to-play agreements” and “bots” to accomplish this.
UMG’s rebuttal this week stated, “To be clear, UMG disputes the contention that anyone paid for or otherwise used bots to inflate streams of ‘Not Like Us,’ as there is no evidence of any such stream manipulation, and the record evidence—filed in a separate legal proceeding that Drake initiated against UMG but then abandoned earlier this year—is to the contrary.”
