If it didn't already look like Drake had lost the feud of the year, it certainly does now.

In a legal filing Monday, an LLC owned by Drake called Frozen Moments alleged that Universal Music Group and Spotify worked together to make "Not Like Us" — a viral diss track Kendrick Lamar released about Drake earlier this year — a bigger hit than it naturally would have been. The petition, filed three days after Drake's rival released the critically acclaimed surprise album "GNX," claims UMG did this by offering lower licensing rates on the song to Spotify in return for promotion, then paying third-party companies to have bots inflate streams of it; "Not Like Us" has surpassed 900 million plays on Spotify. ("Family Matters," a Drake diss track about Lamar released around the same time, has 122 million plays.) The filing also accuses UMG of using pay-to-play tactics to increase the song's radio play and have influencers promote it across social media. It's not a lawsuit yet, but a petition seeking more information about the alleged practice.

"Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game," Drake's filing says. "Every time a song 'breaks through,' it means another artist does not. UMG's choice to saturate the music market with 'Not Like Us' comes at the expense of its other artists, like Drake."

The twist: UMG doesn't just represent Lamar but also Drake. And Drake is one of the biggest artists streaming on Spotify, with about 10 million more monthly listeners than Lamar. If major companies like UMG and Spotify really are conspiring to help one artist over another, they would be severely disrupting the way people discover and come to love music and risking the entire streaming model the music industry now relies on.

Hip-hop fans are mocking Drake's litigiousness as petty and destructive to his street cred. "This is Drake's Jan. 6," the musical artist and former NFL running back Arian Foster posted on X. Music industry insiders, meanwhile, are skeptical of the allegations themselves.

"It's not in Spotify's interest for their model to be undermined by people not getting paid fairly," Tony Rigg, a music industry advisor and lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, tells me. "Bots, potentially, would undermine both" Spotify and UMG. In other words, for the top of the music industry, rigging with bots would be "not like us."

The kind of manipulation, also called artificial listening, that Drake is talking about does happen. Some artists use third-party companies that enlist accounts made by bots to listen to the same playlist on repeat. That's an issue because of how streaming companies pay. They divide up royalty payments from a limited pool of cash. More plays means more of the pie. And as more people have taken to uploading AI-generated slop to streaming platforms like Spotify, they risk becoming more diluted. In September, a North Carolina musician was charged with music streaming fraud; the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York claims he made more than $10 million using those kinds of tactics. (The case is ongoing.) Smaller artists looking to make money off streaming can suffer. But it's harder to know how it could affect megastars like Drake and Lamar, who are already among the top performers in Spotify's streaming ranks.

There are more than 100 million songs each on popular streaming platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, and SoundCloud. Last year, Spotify booted tens of thousands of songs from its platform reported to be generated by AI and also listened to by bots — essentially, computer music for computers. UMG itself has pushed back against AI-generated music, trying to block AI from training on its catalogs on streaming platforms.

Spotify declined to comment, but the company does have policies in place to detect and combat artificial streaming. A UMG spokesperson told me that "the suggestion that UMG would do anything to undermine any of its artists is offensive and untrue. We employ the highest ethical practices in our marketing and promotional campaigns. No amount of contrived and absurd legal arguments in this pre-action submission can mask the fact that fans choose the music they want to hear."

Fans can argue whether Drake or Lamar won the feud. By throwing lawyers and corporations into the rap battle, Drake has made it much less street and much more corporate. It's hard to imagine bots would be driving so many listeners to Lamar, a 17-time Grammy award winner. The song itself has been nominated for five Grammys, has been used at political events and protests around the world, and became a hit on TikTok. In the end, the attention, and ears, on the two artists' beef may have made Spotify and UMG both winners.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.