Drake Narrowly Beats Kendrick Lamar To Major 2025 Streaming Milestone

Drake may have arguably lost the battle with Kendrick Lamar, but his fan base hasn’t gone anywhere and he’s still out here hitting musical milestones.

Though he won by just 48 hours, Drizzy just beat out Kendrick to become the first rapper to hit one billion streams on Spotify thus far in 2025. K. Dot hit the milestone in 29 days, while it took Drake 27.

Conversely, Kendrick leads the charge for the most monthly listeners on Spotify for January at 81 million, while Drizzy follows in the runner-up spot with 73 million.

Kai Cenat recently revisited the beef and named the back and forth as his favorite moment of his career thus far.

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“That was the most fun experience I’ve had,” he told Billboard. “I’m not going to lie. We never experienced something like that. It was a good week. Everybody had their opinions. I was literally hopping on stream and had like 60,000 viewers. As soon as they dropped, my shit was spiked to like 100,000.”

As far as a winner, he told the publication: “I’m cool with Drake, so people would expect me to be on Drake’s side. But I’m not going to lie – Kendrick won that battle. It was good. I loved every second of it. I was just appreciating the moment. Like, bro, we got bangers right now that’s dropping back to back and everybody’s talking about them. It was definitely fire.”

Despite his aforementioned relationship with Drake, Kai was actually recently named in the OVO rapper’s defamation lawsuit against his longtime record label, Universal Music Group.

The streamer’s video reaction to Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” is mentioned in the suit, which claims that UMG removed the diss track’s copyright restrictions on YouTube and Twitch “for the purpose of spreading the [song] and its defamatory content, as broadly as possible and as quickly as possible.”

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During a recent stream, Cenat read through the lawsuit and was astonished to discover his name and content mentioned in the bombshell legal filing.

“Wait, why am I in this shit?! Wait, hold on! I’m getting sued?!” he initially asked his viewers after misunderstanding the situation.

He then referenced the fact that Drake messaged him on Instagram back in May and tipped him off to the release of his own diss song “Family Matters.”

“N-gga, this night I was told to stay on stream!” he yelled incredulously.

Kai eventually realized that he was not in fact being sued by Drake and breathed a sigh of relief: “Oh, I’m good! I’m alright! So he’s just using us as examples of spreading misinformation type shit?”

He then denied unsubstantiated rumors that he and other streamers/YouTubers were paid by UMG to react to “Not Like Us.”

“N-ggas ain’t that weak!” he said, before gushing over the success of his video reactions to Drake and Kendrick’s respective diss tracks. “Both ways, n-ggas ate crazy, gang. I wasn’t even complaining. All my shit’s monetized.”