A new class action lawsuit has been launched against Spotify, accusing the music streaming giant of harboring massive streaming fraud on its platform, with Drake particularly alleged to have benefited from billions of artificial streams. The suit, filed in a California federal court on Sunday, is brought by rapper RBX, cousin of Snoop Dogg, who claims that Spotify "turns a blind eye" to the rampant fraud that occurs on its platform, resulting in the siphoning of royalties from other artists.
Drake, though not named as a defendant in the complaint, is the sole artist mentioned in the suit. RBX, whose real name is Eric Dwayne Collins, alleges that "between January 2022 and September 2025, a significant and non-trivial percentage of Drake's ~37 billion streams on Spotify during that timeframe were inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts."
While Drake is the only artist highlighted in the lawsuit, the suit notes that the case "does not stand alone." The artist (and his team) is not accused of fraudulently manipulating streams but is simply listed as a beneficiary of such rampant fraud.
Spotify pays out artists using a "pro rata" model, where all streams on the platform are compiled and royalties are doled out based on an artist's percentage of the overall streaming marketplace. If an artist uses bots or other fraudulent methods to artificially inflate their stream count, it would unfairly give them a larger share of the royalty pool and dilute royalties that would go to legitimate streams.
Spotify is the sole defendant in the suit, and the bulk of the complaint focuses on the company's alleged inability and/or unwillingness to police fraud, calling Spotify's efforts "nothing more than window dressing, inadequate at best."
The suit reads, "To satisfy constant pressure from shareholders to grow the business and increase stock prices, Spotify needs an ever-expanding population of users to engage on its platform. The more users (including fake users) Spotify has, the more advertisements it can sell, the more profits the company can report, all of which serves to increase the purported value delivered to shareholders."
Streaming fraud has plagued streaming services for years, with the issue only worsening as fraudsters flood the zone with AI slop tracks and bot farms. In a statement, a Spotify spokesperson refuted the notion that the company gains from streaming fraud and pointed to efforts the streaming service has instituted to combat the practice.
"We cannot comment on pending litigation. However, Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming," the spokesperson said. "We heavily invest in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat it and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and charging penalties. Our systems are working: In a case from last year, one bad actor was indicted for stealing $10 million from streaming services, only $60,000 of which came from Spotify, proving how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform."
While Spotify is the lone defendant, many of the more noteworthy claims in the complaint revolve around Drake in particular. Collins alleges that many of Drake's streams reflect "abnormal VPN usage" to obscure where the listens are coming from. He further alleges that over a four-day period in 2024, at least 250,000 streams of Drake's song "No Face" originated in Turkey but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in an attempt to obscure their origins.
Collins also alleges that "less than 2% of his users accounts for roughly 15% of his overall streams. And roughly 9% of his streams are attributable to less than 1% of his users. As a result
