Drake’s attorneys have fired back at Spotify after they shared a statement criticizing the Toronto rapper’s claims laid out in his legal complaint against the DSP and its major label client Universal Music Group (UMG).
On Friday (December 20), Drake’s legal counsel fired back at Spotify. The statement arrived after the streaming giant filed court docs in New York Supreme Court denying the OVO Sound co-founder’s allegations that it used bots to log 30,000 streams of the chart-topping single around its initial release.
In addition to pushing back on claims that the company accepted undisclosed payments in connection with the scheme, Spotify asserted that Drake’s case was a “subversion of the normal judicial process.” In response, Drake’s team appeared to call Spotify’s bluff while also daring them to undergo due legal process to prove them wrong.
“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 statement obtained by Variety read in part. “If Spotify and UMG have nothing to hide then they should be perfectly fine complying with this basic discovery request.”
Prior to Drake’s legal team’s rebuttal to Spotify, indie artist Russ chimed in on the topic to share a theory of his own. In essence, the CHOMP album architect appeared to suggest that Drake’s claims about bots being used to boost streams isn’t baseless.
However, in doing so he also seemingly called out the industry over payola while revealing his thoughts on why it would be bad for streaming companies to publicly acknowledge major labels’ alleged illegal practices.
“Spotify knows who’s faking their streams lol however, they’re not gonna ever (imo) publicly expose any major labels due to potential consequences,” Russ started off in the lengthy tweet. “Major labels could retaliate by pulling their top artists music from Spotify. That would obviously diminish Spotify’s value and attractiveness to subscribers.”
In another tweet added in the thread he concluded, “I know everyone loves to hate rich companies or rich anything but tbh in this situation Spotify is lowkey the victim bein held hostage by major labels.”
Check out the tweet Russ shared in the post below.
