There’s No Lawsuit You Can Sell Me

The lawsuits Drake’s legal team threatened against Universal Music Group could disappear before they reach court, so we might never know if the record company put its giant thumb on the scale to help Kendrick Lamar win this year’s hottest rap beef. And whether KDot’s eye-popping streaming stats are legit or, as Team Drake’s lawyers allege, fake as a spray tan, may remain a mystery.

But do you know who is guaranteed to do real numbers in 2025?

New Ho King, the restaurant on Spadina Ave. in downtown Toronto that KDot name checked in “Euphoria,” an early salvo in the heated back-and-forth with Drake. Last May they offered a Kendrick Lamar Special to thank him for the uptick in business, and this spring they’d better brace for another flood of new customers.

The restaurant is just over a mile north of the Rogers Centre, where KDot’s upcoming GNX Tour is scheduled to arrive on June 12. By the time I finished outlining this post, Kendrick had added a second show, scheduled for the next night. Fifty thousand Kendrick fans within walking distance? Two straight days? If you haven’t already made a reservation, you’d better call soon. By sunrise on June 14, New Ho King’s management will look like Muhammad Ali sitting on a million dollars in that iconic Sports Illustrated cover photo.

As for the headliner — six months ahead of the Toronto show, he’s already riding a tidal wave of outlandish sales and streaming figures. His new album, GNX, did 363 million Spotify streams within a week of its release. That’s the best first week of any album this year, and the seventh-highest debut week figure of all time. KDot’s streams and sales figure to swell post-Supebowl, where his halftime performance will double as a 13-minute infomercial for his 19-city springtime tour.

It’s a new level fame, even for an established rap titan, and if the hatred between them didn’t run so deep KDot could send Drake a Thank You note. Kendrick doesn’t become a global phenomenon by beating up on any other rapper. He went from star to megastar because he kayoed Drake, the incumbent Biggest Name in Hip-Hop. In the fight game we’d say Drake put Kendrick over, and launched this phase of KDot’s career just as Oscar De La Hoya’s loss to Floyd gave us boxing’s Money Mayweather Era.

Drake actually deserves some credit, and could take it if he could admit that he lost. Except he still thinks he can win — hoping longshot lawsuits might succeed where “Family Matters” and “The Heart Pt 6” failed. If he can’t drop KDot for a 10-count, maybe the judges can hand him a victory.

Solid strategy if you have the skills to outbox a brawler, but seven months into this back-and-forth, KDot is still beating Drake to the punch. Drake’s lawyers threatened a suit alleging fake numbers; Kendrick announced concerts at real stadiums and arenas. Team Drake warned a second lawsuit was coming; KDot booked that second show in Toronto, if you’re keeping score, which all of us are.

And if you’re still confused over whether Kendrick is benefitting from puffed-up numbers, note which of these two rappers is selling actual tickets to authentic spectators, and which one keeps cooking up countermoves that in the end up costing him credibility.

That’s ground zero here, at least from Kendrick’s perspective: whether or not Drake is credible as a rapper, as a Black man, and as a father. For KDot, the answer on all three fronts is “no.” He labels Drake a liar in “Euphoria,” and repeats the accusation in some form on every diss track that follows.

We don’t know how deeply that insult cuts because we don’t know Drake personally, but we know that, at some level, credibility matters to him. It’s why he threatened to quit Degrassi back in the day. His character was wheelchair-bound, and Drake said it made him look soft in front of his rapper friends. In other words, a fictional character’s disability cost Drake credibility in real life, and he was willing to quit his job to get it back.

In that context, scrubbing “The Heart Pt 6” Instagram looked like progress, a mature acknowledgement that his clapback to “Not Like Us” fell short. Drake claimed in that song that he fed Kendrick fake information, a strange boast to make when your rival has spun those facts into a song that made you a worldwide punchline. He also said that Kendrick had been molested as a child, which, even if true, is a revelation, but not an insult. It’s a cruel joke that only lands with bullies who laugh at other people’s suffering.

Deleting the song seemed an acknowledgement that the song made Drake look petty and desperate and cruel, and that his claims wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny. It looked like a moment of self-awareness, and a step toward making Drake believable again.

But then came November and the first legal action, a threatened lawsuit claiming that the Universal Music Group — the record label backing both Drake and Kendrick — conspired to boost Kendrick at Drake’s expense. The filing alleges that UMG used a combination of bots and payoffs to artificially inflate “Not Like Us” among DJs, on social media, and on streaming sites.

The second threatened lawsuit came a day later, and alleged that UMG allowed “Not Like Us” to go public, knowing the song contained defamatory claims about Drake — specifically that he preys on underage women.

As a post-emptive cease-and-desist, the defamation claim will probably flop. What, after all, is a rap beef besides two people trading defamatory statements over dope beats? Kendrick didn’t call the lawyers after Drake called him a wife beater and his life partner an adulteress. He called DJ Mustard, and he wrote “Not Like Us.” That’s how rappers handle insults. Pen, pad, studio, mic.

As for the other allegation?

Maybe UMG really did did choose Kendrick over Drake.

Putting somebody over often means feeding an established name to an ascendant star, in a fight that’s not fixed but not quite fair. It’s late-career De La Hoya dieting down to welterweight just to get smashed by a younger, faster Manny Pacquiao in 2008. It’s 37-year-old Guillermo Rigondeaux jumping up two weight classes, then getting blown out by Vasiliy Lomachenko in 2017. If boxing promoters can manipulate ages and weight classes to create matchups that virtually guarantee a winner, record labels and streaming sites can do the same with any artist they choose.

Drake knows. Up until now, to the extent that the fight for streams might be fixed, the playing field’s been tilted in his favour. GNX had the seventh-best opening week in Spotify history; four of the six albums ahead of it are Drake’s. His music pops up on algorithm-generated playlists across genres, and that setup helps him do huge numbers. Spotify has offered me countless Drake-centric mixes even though, as my 2024 wrapped will tell you, I’m mainly there for salsa and slow jams. But when those same computers boost Kendrick to the top of the charts, it’s time to call the law?

I guess.

Some folks have advanced the theory that Drake is after a more fundamental form of justice, exposing and upending a rigged industry for the benefit of exploited musicians everywhere. It’s a noble ideal, but we already know how Drake feels about folks who stick up for the underprivileged. In “Family Matters” he said Kendrick raps like he’s “bout to get the slaves freed.”

As an insult.

Drake’s not a civil rights leader here. He’s the guy at the gym who thinks everybody stronger than him is on steroids.

More accurately, if we’re comparing algorithms and aggressive marketing to PEDs, we have to acknowledge that few superstars are clean. Show me an artist with half a billion plays on Spotify, and I’ll show you somebody getting a big boost from… Spotify.

So Drake threatening to sue over streaming numbers is more like Mark McGwire watching Barry Bonds hit 73 homers, then calling the commissioner to complain that drug use is ruining his sport. A valid argument overall. Just not credible coming from him.

We still believe Spotify, though, who announced on Wednesday that Drake is their most popular rap artist of the year — for the eighth straight time. Among U.S. listeners, he trailed only Taylor Swift. Kendrick ranked seventh.

The update looks at first like vindication, but actually makes Drake’s claims appear even shakier.

Spotify’s numbers are fake — unless Drake’s back at number one. Then they’re real.

Kendrick’s a dupe for repeating the false info Drake fed him — unless he turns it into the biggest hit song on the planet. Then it’s defamation.

The logic is tougher to follow than a Kendrick Lamar quintuple entendre.

The truth is, most of us will never know the actual streaming figures, or the extent to which fake plays inflate anybody’s data. But we can look at the public numbers and ask some questions.

Why, for example, hasn’t Drake’s statistical landslide translated into cultural impact? “The Pop Out” brought Crips, Bloods, NBA players and rap stars together to celebrate Juneteenth live on Amazon Prime, and the “Not Like Us” video release is a genuine where-were-you-when-it-happened moment. If Drake dropped anything this spring that touched that many people that deeply, we all must have missed it.

We can also compare platforms. Kendrick landed the top song on Apple Music, which is paywalled. Drake leads the way on Spotify, which we can access for free. I’m not saying either guy is cheating, but if I wanted to raise an army of bots to juice my streaming stats, I’d send them to the site that doesn’t require credit card info and an Apple ID.

Or we can just note that Kendrick is running up the only numbers that really count — paying customers. If he sells out both Toronto shows he’ll have performed before nearly 100,000 ticket buyers. If Drake’s legal team succeeds they’ll get to pleads their case in front of a judge and 12 jurors. That’s a real number that Drake can take to court, if he’s lucky.

KDot’s already taking his allegedly phony fan support to the bank.

And to the Rogers Centre.

And maybe to New Ho King for an after party.

 

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