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Drake makes wild claim that Apple was paid to ‘purposely misdirect’ Siri requests toward rival Kendrick Lamar’s song

Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud appears to have no end in sight, and now Apple is unwittingly getting pulled into the complicated affair thanks to a possible Siri malfunction and Apple Music.

Apple gets dragged into messy artist rivalry

According to Billboard, Drake is taking legal action against his music label, Universal Music Group (UMG), as well as Spotify.

The artist claims the two conspired to boost rival Kendrick Lamar’s song ‘Not Like Us’ in which Lamar makes a big allegation against Drake.

But it’s not just UMG and Spotify who are in the hot seat with Drake. In a legal filing in Manhattan this week, the artist alleges that Apple is involved too.

From the legal filing:

On information and belief, UMG paid, or approved payments to, Apple Inc. to have its voice-activated digital assistant “Siri” purposely misdirect users to “Not Like Us.” 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.

Apple hasn’t technically been accused of any legal wrongdoing, since the target here is Universal Music Group.

Top comment by Mike Beasley

Liked by 2 people

The part they leave out is that the lyric right before the one they cited is “certified loverboy,” meaning Siri was keying in on an actual lyric to Not Like Us. There’s no conspiracy here, just Siri misinterpreting the albums name as a lyric.

Drake looks like such a little baby doing all this.

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That said, it’s a really wild claim, and one that could either be assumed a fabrication or, perhaps, a result of Siri’s not-so-amazing track record.

Is it possible that Siri played Lamar’s song by accident at times? Sure. I’ve seen Siri make all kinds of bizarre mistakes at times.

But Apple essentially taking a bribe to boost a hit song from Drake’s rival via Siri and Apple Music? That’s an extremely bizarre shot to take at the company. One that lacks weight behind it, not just because of how farfetched it sounds, but also because Drake isn’t actually taking legal action against the company.

What do you make of this story? Let us know in the comments.

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Avatar for Ryan Christoffel Ryan Christoffel

Ryan got his start in journalism as an Editor at MacStories, where he worked for four years covering Apple news, writing app reviews, and more. For two years he co-hosted the Adapt podcast on Relay FM, which focused entirely on the iPad. As a result, it should come as no surprise that his favorite Apple device is the iPad Pro.

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