Streaming services restore Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ after brief removal

Kendrick Lamar’s music briefly disappeared, then came right back — and that was enough to send rap internet into full detective mode. The big flashpoint was “Not Like Us,” the Drake diss that became one of the defining songs of 2024. Fans noticed the video was gone from YouTube on Monday, May 11, and parts of Lamar’s catalog also looked missing on some streaming services. By later that day, the material had returned, but not cleanly — at least one reupload appeared to reset the video’s public view count. ### What actually disappeared? The most visible removal was the “Not Like Us” video from Kendrick Lamar’s official YouTube presence. At roughly the same time, fans also spotted “Luther” being reuploaded, while the album *GNX* was missing from Apple Music and unavailable on Tidal for a stretch. Complex also noted that “Euphoria” briefly disappeared before coming back, while Spotify seemed less affected than some rival platforms. (tmz.com) ### Was this a full takedown? Not really — that’s the important part. This did not look like Kendrick Lamar’s whole catalog being wiped from the internet. Some official audio uploads stayed up. “Squabble Up” kept its original view count. Spotify still had *GNX* while Apple Music and Tidal showed gaps. That uneven pattern makes this feel more like a platform, rights-management, or asset-delivery problem than a coordinated purge. That said, nobody involved had publicly explained it in the coverage that surfaced around the outage. (complex.com) ### Why did people fixate on “Not Like Us”? Because “Not Like Us” is not just another Kendrick song. It’s the diss record that turned the Kendrick-Drake feud into a mass-pop event. So when that specific video vanishes for even a few hours, people don’t read it as random housekeeping. They read it as a move. TMZ’s writeup said the reupload effectively restarted the video from scratch on the public-facing counter, and another roundup pegged the old total at more than 400 million views. (complex.com) That gives the disappearance real weight — it wasn’t some obscure clip with no footprint. ### So why now? The timing is what made this explode. Drake is in the final stretch of his *ICEMAN* rollout, with a last livestream episode scheduled for May 14 and the album set to arrive at midnight on May 15. In the days leading up to that, there were also reports and clips tied to Drake activity around Toronto’s CN Tower, which kept attention on anything that looked feud-adjacent. When Kendrick’s biggest Drake diss suddenly blinks out during that window, people are going to connect dots whether or not the dots belong together. (tmz.com) ### Does this mean Kendrick was trolling Drake? Maybe — but there’s no hard proof of that. The cleaner read is that something technical or administrative happened, then got fixed fast. The catch is that rap fans are not neutral observers here. In a normal week, a temporary disappearance might register as backend mess. In the week of a Drake album rollout, the same glitch becomes narrative fuel. That’s basically what happened. ### What’s the real consequence? (thesource.com) The practical issue is the metrics. If a video gets removed and reuploaded instead of restored in place, the public view counter can restart. That matters for fan perception, chart-era bragging rights, and the visible legacy of a song that already had huge cultural reach. Even if the underlying streams and rights are fine, the public-facing history can look scrambled. ### Is everything back now? As of the latest coverage, yes — the missing pieces had reappeared. But the episode still matters because it showed how fragile streaming-era permanence can be. A song can feel omnipresent, then vanish for a morning because of some opaque platform issue, rights update, or upload change. And when that song is “Not Like Us,” even a short outage turns into a story. ### Bottom line? Nothing here proves a new Kendrick move or a fresh Drake response. (fakta.co) But the brief removal of “Not Like Us” and *GNX* landed at exactly the worst — or most interesting — possible moment, so a likely technical disruption got treated like the next chapter of a feud that still drives attention.