Drake drops cases over ‘Not Like Us’ before filing defamation lawsuit
Two months earlier, Drake filed petitions in New York and Texas over his claim UMG schemed to “artificially inflate” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
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- Drake’s ongoing legal cases now include a federal defamation lawsuit in New York and a petition in Texas, which accuses Universal Music Group of paying off radio stations to play “Not Like Us.”
- Drake alleges UMG, which distributes both his and Kendrick Lamar’s music, has continued to defame him with the release of Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” which the rapper performed at the Super Bowl.
Three months after he accused record label Universal Music Group in a Texas court filing of making “covert payments” to radio stations to “play and promote” Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us,” Drake is letting iHeartRadio off the hook in the case.
Drake and iHeartMedia “reached an amicable resolution of the dispute to the satisfaction of both sides,” according to a Thursday court filing in Bexar County, obtained by USA TODAY on Monday.
The rapper has updated his case – originally filed Nov. 21 – to remove the San Antonio-based company.
“In exchange for documents that showed iHeart did nothing wrong, Drake agreed to drop his petition. No payments were made by either one of us,” a spokesperson for iHeartMedia said in a statement to USA TODAY on Monday.
Drake’s legal team, meanwhile, is “pleased that the parties were able to reach a settlement satisfactory to both sides, and have no further comment on this matter,” according to a statement provided to USA TODAY.
Drake’s Nov. 21 petition, which was not a lawsuit but instead a precursor to potential legal action, sought to depose UMG and iHeartMedia and obtain proof of his claim that his music distributor “funneled payments” to iHeartRadio as part of a “pay-to-play scheme” to “inflate artificially the metrics” and spread “Not Like Us” across the airwaves.
What is Drake’s Texas court case regarding ‘Not Like Us’ about?
The song, which was released May 4 and dominated the 2025 Grammy Awards last month, calls Drake a “certified pedophile.” It also drops an incendiary verse that has gone viral and been co-signed by major members of the music industry, if the Grammys sing-along was any indication: “Tryna strike a chord and it’s probably A-Minor.”
Drake’s petition offers a more detailed look at Drake’s ire toward UMG over the allegations against Drake in Lamar’s song. His petition claimed the company “knew that the song itself, as well as its accompanying album art and music video, attacked the character of another one of UMG’s most prominent artists, Drake, by falsely accusing him of being a sex offender, engaging in pedophilic acts, harboring sex offenders, and committing other criminal sexual acts.”
Due to UMG’s control over the licensing of “Not Like Us” through Interscope Records, Drake’s lawyers said, the company “could have refused to release or distribute the song or required the offending material to be edited and/or removed.”
The latest in Drake’s legal cases over Kendrick Lamar’s diss track
A week after their legal move in Texas, Drake’s team filed a petition in New York Supreme Court that accused UMG and Spotify of engaging in a “scheme to ensure” Lamar’s diss track, “Not Like Us,” “broke through” on multiple streaming platforms.
He claimed UMG used underhanded tactics to garner more listeners for the Lamar song on Spotify and radio stations, which resulted in “Not Like Us” breaking a few Spotify records and landing at No. 1 twice on the Billboard Top 100.
UMG denied the “offensive and untrue” claims in a statement to USA TODAY at the time.
In January, Drake dropped the case and pivoted to a defamation case against UMG.
In a civil lawsuit filed in New York federal court, Drake’s legal team claimed that despite a decade-long relationship, his and Lamar’s shared music distributor “intentionally sought to turn Drake into a pariah, a target for harassment, or worse.” They also wrote the company sought to “profit from damaging Drake’s reputation.”
Drake sued for defamation, second-degree harassment via promoting violence against him and deceptive business practices. “Not Like Us,” he alleged, spreads defamatory claims about Drake, including that he engages in sexual relations with minors and sex trafficking and also harbors sex offenders.
In a statement to USA TODAY at the time, UMG called Drake’s claims “untrue,” denying ever engaging in defamation. The spokesperson said, in part, that Drake is trying to “weaponize the legal process to silence an artist’s creative expression and to seek damages from UMG for distributing that artist’s music.”
Drake: UMG spread ‘defamatory content’ with Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show
A pretrial conference for the case is scheduled for April 2, but UMG’s attorneys have argued the meeting should not take place until the judge weighs the merits of their request to dismiss the case.
Drake’s team opposed the move in a Feb. 24 filing in response to the motion, accusing the defense of delaying discovery, or the exchange of information so both parties can gather evidence.
“At the same time UMG has been delaying here, UMG launched new campaigns to further spread the defamatory content, including at the 2025 Super Bowl halftime show, which had over 133.5 million viewers,” the filing stated.
In a Feb. 21 letter to the judge, one of UMG’s lawyers noted Drake’s team “has agreed to withdraw certain key allegations in his complaint.”
However, the “God’s Plan” rapper’s lawyers claimed this was a misleading statement, saying Drake only “agreed to address UMG’s concerns regarding a single factual allegation,” which would at most “result in changes to 5 paragraphs of a Complaint spanning 237 paragraphs over 81-pages.”
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