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Spotify has officially fired back against Drake’s claims that it and Universal Music conspired to artificially boost the popularity of Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us.”
Update (12/20): Shortly after this piece’s publication, a Drake rep reached out with a statement from the artist’s legal team at Willkie Farr & Gallagher.
“It is not surprising that Spotify is trying to distance themselves from UMG’s allegedly manipulative practices to artificially inflate streaming numbers on behalf of one of its other artists,” the legal team said. “If Spotify and UMG have nothing to hide then they should be perfectly fine complying with this basic discovery request.”
Below is our original coverage of Spotify’s answer to the petition.
The platform refuted Drake’s allegations today, after the Australia-bound artist levied (via his Frozen Moments company) streaming manipulation claims against it as well as UMG last month.
As many know, those decidedly serious accusations of wrongdoing – which could have enormous implications for the involved companies and the broader industry if proven true – arrived amid a well-documented Drake v. Kendrick Lamar beef.
Lamar’s allegedly defamatory “Not Like Us,” Drake maintained in his petition targeting Spotify and UMG, benefited when the label charged the streaming service “licensing rates 30 percent lower than its usual” in exchange for a promotional push targeting users “searching for other unrelated songs and artists.”
UMG/Interscope further utilized bots to inflate the stream count of “Not Like Us” (which had racked up 963 million Spotify plays at the time of writing), to the tune of 30 million fake plays on Spotify out of the gate, according to Drake.
Though Drake’s far-reaching qualms hardly end there – the 38-year-old also filed a separate legal action against iHeartRadio and UMG – the described claims appear to be the most significant from Spotify’s perspective.
But at least as the streaming platform sees things, Drake provided “no facts” whatsoever in support of the “information-and-belief and hearsay assertions.” Overall, these assertions don’t pertain to Spotify in any event, the service indicated in more words.
“Similarly,” Spotify summed up in opposing Drake’s petition, “as to the ‘unknown’ individual who claimed that Spotify is ‘easy to bot’ and purports to have received compensation from Interscope to artificially inflate streams…the allegation concerns dealings between parties not including Spotify.”
(The music service “found no evidence to substantiate this unidentified individual’s claim,” it elaborated in a footnote.)
Meanwhile, Drake purportedly failed “to identify any specific misleading misrepresentation or omission allegedly made” by Spotify, according to the legal text.
Furthermore, even if Drake could illustrate a decline in his music’s popularity due to the alleged “Not Like Us” scheme, the listenership slip might be attributable to “a host of other plausible factors.”
Shifting to remarks filed separately by head of music and audiobooks business David Kaefer, “UMG and Spotify have never had any arrangement in which UMG ‘charged Spotify licensing rates 30 percent’” less than usual in exchange for recommending the relevant Lamar track to users.
“The Petition claims that an unidentified individual reported on a podcast that he used bots to achieve 30,000,000 streams on Spotify in the first days of the release of ‘Not Like Us,’” added the over six-year Spotify higher-up Kaefer. “Spotify found no evidence to substantiate this claim.”
Plus, “Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of artificial streaming on our platform,” Kaefer concluded, adding for good measure that the company may respond to manipulation by “removing streaming numbers, withholding royalties and charging penalty fees.”
Time will tell whether the court dismisses the petition against Spotify. Regarding the overarching rap beef, Drake’s aforementioned Australia tour is set to initiate on Super Bowl Sunday, when Lamar will take the stage at the big game.
And as Drake appears to be making new music, yet another diss track might debut sooner rather than later.