A class action lawsuit filed against Spotify alleges that the streaming platform turned a “blind eye” to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming,” with rapper Drake being a key beneficiary of “billions” of fake streams.
Rolling Stone reports that a class action lawsuit has been filed against Spotify, accusing the platform of allowing rampant streaming fraud to artificially inflate the numbers of certain artists, most notably superstar rapper Drake. The lawsuit, filed in California District Court on Sunday night by rapper RBX, claims that “billions” of Drake’s streams between January 2022 and September 2025 were “inauthentic” and the result of “a sprawling network of Bot Accounts.”
According to the complaint, Spotify has “turned a blind eye” to this “mass-scale fraudulent streaming,” which causes “massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders.” In the current “streamshare” royalty model used by Spotify and other platforms, subscription and ad revenue is pooled and then divided based on each artist’s share of total streams. This means that fake streams for one artist directly siphon money away from others.
The lawsuit points to several pieces of evidence that allegedly prove a “substantial, non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s approximately 37 billion streams during the specified time period were fraudulent. This includes claims of abnormal VPN usage obscuring the location of bot accounts, a high volume of streams originating from areas with populations too small to support such numbers, significant upticks in streams for Drake songs long after release, and slower decay rates compared to other artists.
One of the key allegations in the lawsuit is that less than two percent of Drake-streaming accounts were allegedly responsible for roughly 15 percent of his total streams, with some accounts reportedly listening to his music 23 hours per day. The lawsuit states that as a result, “Drake’s music accumulated far higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had far more ‘users’ than Drake.”
While Drake himself is not named as a defendant, only Spotify, the lawsuit argues that these allegedly fraudulent streams “generated significant revenues” for the rapper and his company at the expense of other artists. It also accuses Spotify of deliberately allowing the fraud to continue, as high stream and user numbers help the platform attract advertisers, especially on its free tier which is particularly vulnerable to bot manipulation.
This case comes on the heels of Drake’s own recently dismissed lawsuit against Universal Music Group, which contained its own allegations of streaming fraud used to artificially boost the numbers for Kendrick Lamar’s Drake diss track “Not Like Us.” Streaming fraud has been a hot topic in the industry, with estimates of annual losses ranging from $300 million to as high as $3 billion.
Authorities worldwide have begun cracking down, with recent fraud convictions in Denmark and Brazil, an ongoing investigation into Spotify in Turkey, and a major indictment last year in the U.S. against a North Carolina musician accused of using AI and bots to generate $10 million in royalties.
Read more at Rolling Stone here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
Read the full article here