Over the weekend of July 26 and 27, 2026, Drake’s verified YouTube channel — the one sitting at more than 32 million subscribers — briefly had a full version of Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 Grammy-winning diss track “Not Like Us” sitting on it. The upload carried the title “Not Like Us @PAYPHOBIA INSTAGRAM” and the credit line “Provided to YouTube by OffStep.” Screenshots and short clips of the song right there on Drake’s official page started flying around X almost immediately. Fans went from straight confusion to cracking up at how ridiculous the whole thing looked.
Lamar put the record out in May 2024 right in the middle of their very public feud. It still ranks as one of the sharpest tracks in recent hip-hop. He goes straight at Drake on predatory behavior and cultural appropriation. Seeing that exact song auto-play under Drake’s own verified checkmark felt like the ultimate punchline. Comment sections filled with people joking that Drake had finally dropped a classic or that he was “living in his truth.” The video got taken down within a few hours, but not before it had already spread everywhere.
At first people thought it was a wave of account hacks. It wasn’t. No passwords got cracked. Someone just submitted tracks through a lightly moderated distributor called OffStepMusic using the exact artist names. YouTube’s automatic matching system then pushed those tracks onto the artists’ official Topic channels and, in a few cases, their verified pages. Playboi Carti took the biggest hit — an entire unreleased album plus more than twenty older leaks showed up on his channel. Kendrick’s page briefly had two unreleased tracks titled “Prayer” and “I’m Better,” along with Drake’s own earlier diss “Family Matters.” The same thing hit Kanye West, Travis Scott, Frank Ocean, Michael Jackson, Ken Carson, d4vd, Future, Juice WRLD and The Weeknd.
Plenty of the uploads included links to a Discord server that blew past two thousand members in just a few hours, plus plugs for Instagram accounts like @payphobia, which is tied to a musician who goes by Osa. One of the tracks that landed on Drake’s channel was a short troll song called “Kendrick a Meanie (Diss)” with a thumbnail that looked like somebody rapping inside a children’s daycare. These weren’t people breaking into studio accounts. They were just using a distribution pipeline that barely bothered to check if the uploader actually owned the music.
Drake, born Aubrey Drake Graham in Toronto, has spent the years since the 2024 battle trying to move on with his album Iceman. Having the song that marked the lowest point of that feud appear on his own channel still hit different. Lamar, the Compton native whose catalog keeps dominating awards conversations, didn’t say a word. Neither did the labels or management teams for the first full day. YouTube’s support account eventually acknowledged the issue, said teams were working on a fix, and promised to contact the affected creators, but they didn’t offer any clear timeline.
OffStepMusic sells itself as a simple, royalty-friendly service aimed at independent artists. Its own help pages already have a guide on how to report tracks that don’t belong on a Topic channel, which tells you the matching problem wasn’t exactly brand new. People who watch the industry noted that similar metadata tricks have been floating around for years. The combination of weak checks at OffStep and YouTube’s aggressive auto-linking just made this one spread wider than most. By Monday afternoon almost all the unauthorized videos were gone. The screenshots and the memes stuck around a lot longer.
For a few hours this past weekend, one of the biggest commercial rappers alive had his rival’s most damaging record sitting right on his own verified channel. It didn’t take some sophisticated breach. It just took a distributor that didn’t ask enough questions before pushing the content live.
