Canadian rapper Drake has reportedly reached a settlement with iHeartMedia months after filing a legal petition amid his monumental rap beef with West Coast rapper Kendrick Lamar.
“We are pleased that the parties were able to reach a settlement satisfactory to both sides, and have no further comment on this matter,” the legal team for Drake, whose full name is Aubrey Drake Graham, told HuffPost on Monday.
The settlement removes iHeartMedia — but Universal Music Group, Graham’s label — from the petition, which was filed in November last year in Texas. The petition is not a lawsuit but rather a preliminary move for such an action.
In the petition, Graham claimed that UMG executed “irregular and inappropriate business practices” to get Lamar’s “Not Like Us” additional airtime on the radio. (Both Lamar and Graham have contracts with entities under UMG.)
Specifically, Graham alleged that UMG made payments to San Antonio-based iHeartMedia for the airtime, a practice known as payola. iHeartMedia, which the Federal Communications Commission is currently investigating for different payola claims, did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
“Before it approved the release of the song, UMG 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,” Graham’s petition, which HuffPost obtained, states. “Specifically, the song calls Drake a ‘certified pedophile,’ a ‘predator,’ and someone whose name should ‘be registered and placed on neighborhood watch.’”
Lamar’s hit diss track, “Not Like Us,” came out of a monthslong beef with Graham. Lamar earned five Grammys from the song; he also headlined the Super Bowl halftime show last month, during which he performed “Not Like Us” and taunted Graham by pointing to his legal action amid their feud.
Graham has filed multiple legal actions in relation to the rap beef; the most notable one is the defamation lawsuit against UMG that he filed in January demanding a jury trial. The suit, which doesn’t list Lamar as a defendant, claims that UMG deliberately moved to make Drake “a pariah, a target for harassment, or worse.”
“UMG may spin this complaint as a rap beef gone legal, but this lawsuit is not about a war of words between artists,” the suit says. “It is, instead, entirely about UMG, the music company that decided to publish, promote, exploit, and monetize allegations that it understood were not only false, but dangerous.”
UMG did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on Monday, but a spokesperson denied Graham’s claims in a previous statement to HuffPost.
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“Not only are these claims untrue, but the notion that we would seek to harm the reputation of any artist — let alone Drake — is illogical,” the spokesperson said in January. “We have invested massively in his music and our employees around the world have worked tirelessly for many years to help him achieve historic commercial and personal financial success.”