Dj Akademiks Tracks Kendrick Lamar's GNX Disappearing and Returning
dj akademiks had a fast-moving streaming oddity on May 11: Kendrick Lamar’s 2024 album GNX briefly disappeared from Apple Music, while the videos for “Luther,” “Not Like Us,” and “Euphoria” were also removed and later restored. For a release that still sat on Spotify and had already built its own digital footprint, the temporary disappearance was less a listening problem than a catalog-management event with visible consequences.
May 11 on Apple Music
Apple Music was the first place fans noticed the change, with GNX gone from the service even as it remained available on Spotify that same day. Tidal also did not carry the album on May 11, which made the removal broader than a single-platform glitch and put Lamar’s current catalog into a patchy state across the major services people use to follow new music.
That gap mattered because the album was not the only thing affected. The videos for “Luther” and “Not Like Us” disappeared from YouTube and were re-uploaded, and “Euphoria” was also re-uploaded on streaming. In each case, the digital reset was visible to fans immediately: the re-uploaded YouTube clips started over with fresh view counts before the originals eventually returned.
YouTube resets and Reddit theories
The re-uploads created the sharpest friction point in the story. A Digital Music News report later found that the new versions were removed again, then the originals came back in their place with their view counts intact. For anyone tracking audience reach in real time, that sequence meant the same pieces of content could appear, vanish, and reappear within a short window while their public totals changed along the way.
Fans in the pop culture chat subreddit filled the silence with theory rather than certainty. Several comments tied the removals to copyright concerns, and the prevailing explanation was that YouTube may have taken the videos down or made them private while changing Content ID. Other commenters pointed to possible changes in the credits for “Not Like Us,” including a suggestion that UMG may have been removed from the song’s credits, or that publishing information was being adjusted to add pgLang.
pgLang, Interscope, and Drake
2020 is the year Lamar co-founded pgLang, and that business link is part of why the removals drew close scrutiny. He remains exclusively linked to Interscope through pgLang, which gave the speculation a corporate edge instead of leaving it as simple fan chatter. Some commenters also noted the possibility that the videos still carried Interscope Records in the ID while edits were being made.
Drake sat in the middle of the noise because several of Lamar’s diss tracks against him were involved, and he was still in a legal battle with UMG over “Not Like Us.” That is the part that keeps this from being a routine takedown story: when a catalog item linked to an active legal fight disappears, every credits change, upload swap, and view-count reset gets treated like a signal.
May 15 was the date Drake’s album ICEMAN was set for release, so the episode landed just as the rivalry was still generating fresh commercial attention. The cleanest takeaway for listeners and industry watchers is simple: Lamar’s catalog was restored, but the upload history now shows how quickly platform-level credit changes can turn a music release into a rights-management story.
