Carbon Chemist

Tag: rap

  • Drake May Soon Find Out If the Law Can Settle a Rap Beef

    Drake May Soon Find Out If the Law Can Settle a Rap Beef

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    Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s ongoing feud already had high marks for being the most technology-fueled rap beef of all time. Dis tracks on Instagram, lyric breakdowns on podcasts, concerts live-streamed on Amazon Prime Video. This week, though, the role technology plays in the dustup hit all new highs (or maybe lows?) via a pair of court filings from Drake, both of them pointing to the importance of streaming music platforms in popular music.

    In the first filing, a pre-action petition filed Monday in New York, attorneys for Drake’s company Frozen Moments accused Lamar’s record label Universal Music Group (UMG) of using several methods to increase plays on “Not Like Us,” including allegations that the record company paid Apple to have Siri direct listeners to the track when they requested Certified Loverboy.

    Drake’s lawyers wrote that “online sources reported that when users asked Siri to play the album Certified Loverboy by recording artist Aubrey Drake Graham d/b/a Drake, Siri instead played ‘Not Like Us,’ which contains the lyric ‘certified pedophile,’ an allegation against Drake.” It also alleges UMG, which is also Drake’s label, “paid, or approved payments to” Apple to have Siri do this.

    In a second filing made in Texas that became public on Tuesday, Drake’s lawyers accused UMG of defamation, claiming the record label could have halted the release of “Not Like Us” or modified it to remove some of its “false” statements about Drake.

    Defamation and Siri-souping are just a couple of the claims made in the petitions. They also allege UMG charged Spotify reduced licensing rates in exchange for the streaming service recommending Lamar’s song to listeners. There are also claims UMG used bots to inflate the streaming numbers for “Not Like Us,” which is approaching 1 billion streams on Spotify and was nominated for five Grammys earlier this month.

    The first petition seeks “pre-action disclosure” of any evidence UMG or Spotify has regarding these allegations. The second does the same of UMG and iHeartRadio, the radio company Drake’s attorneys claim also participated in a “pay-to-play scheme” to promote “Not Like Us.”

    Throughout their beef—which has been escalating since Lamar called out Drake on “Like That” in the spring and seemed all but ended after he dropped “Not Like Us”—both rappers have hurtled haymakers at each other through songs. Allegations regarding domestic violence, hypocrisy, and authenticity have been par for the course. That’s how hip-hop feuds work. But in a war of words that got as heated as Drake and Lamar’s did, to watch it now come to court filings about Spotify streams and Siri suggestions feels both lackluster and the epitome of what happens when rap beefs become so intertwined with technology. Longtime hip-hop fans will always have their opinions about who “won” the beef, but the historical record still counts cold, hard numbers—from Spotify streams to likes on an IG post.

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  • Martin Shkreli Made Copies of His $2 Million Wu-Tang Album—and Hid Them in ‘Safes All Around the World’

    Martin Shkreli Made Copies of His $2 Million Wu-Tang Album—and Hid Them in ‘Safes All Around the World’

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    The members of PleasrDAO are, well, pretty displeased with Martin Shkreli.

    The “digital autonomous organization” spent $4.75 million to buy the fabled Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which had been produced as only a single copy. The album had once belonged to Shkreli, who purchased it directly from Wu-Tang Clan for $2 million in 2015. But after Shkreli became the “pharma bro” poster boy for price gouging in the drug sector, he ended up in severe legal trouble and served a seven-year prison sentence for securities fraud.

    He also had to pay a $7.4 million penalty in that case, and the government seized and then sold Once Upon a Time in Shaolin to help pay the bill.

    The album was truly “one of a kind”—a protest against the devaluation of music in the digital age and the kind of fascinating curio that instantly made its owners into “interesting people.” The album came as a two-CD set inside a nickel and silver box inscribed with the Wu-Tang logo, and the full package included a pair of customized audio speakers and a 174-page leather book featuring lyrics and “anecdotes on the production.”

    In a complicated transaction, PleasrDAO purchased the album from an unnamed intermediary, who had first purchased it from the government. As part of that deal, PleasrDAO created a non-fungible token (NFTs—remember those?) to show ownership of the album. The New York Times has a good description of what this entailed:

    To tie “Once Upon a Time” to the digital realm, an NFT was created to stand as the ownership deed for the physical album, said Peter Scoolidge, a lawyer who specializes in cryptocurrency and NFT deals and was involved in the transaction. The 74 members of PleasrDAO … share collective ownership of the NFT deed, and thus own the album.

    Makin’ Copies …

    But after purchasing the album and sharing the collective ownership of its NFT, PleasrDAO discovered that its “one of a kind” object wasn’t quite as exclusive as it had thought.

    Shkreli had, in fact, made copies of the music. Lots of copies. On June 30, 2022, PleasrDAO said that Shkreli played music from the album on his YouTube channel and stated, “Of course I made MP3 copies, they’re like hidden in safes all around the world … I’m not stupid. I don’t buy something for $2 million just so I can keep one copy.”

    Shkreli began taunting PleasrDAO members about the album, telling one of them, “I literally play it on my Discord all the time, you’re an idiot” and claiming that PleasrDAO was concerned about an album that “>5000 people have.” Shkreli claimed on a 2024 podcast that he had “burned the album and sent it to like, 50 different chicks”—and that this had been extremely good for his sex life.

    Shkreli even offered to send copies of the album to random internet commenters if they would just send him their “email addy.” He also told people to “look out for a torrent” and hosted listening parties for the album on his X account, which reached “potentially over 4,900 listeners.”

    We know all of these details because PleasrDAO has sued Shkreli, claiming that he is acting in violation of the asset forfeiture order and that he is misappropriating “trade secrets” under New York law.

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