Streams

A new class action lawsuit against Spotify alleges the company has “turned a blind eye” to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming” on its platform and that one musician in particular has been the beneficiary of “billions” of fake streams: Drake.

The suit was filed in California District Court on Sunday night with rapper (and cousin of Snoop Dogg) RBX named as the lead plaintiff. While the most eye-popping allegations in the suit relate to Drake’s streaming numbers, there are no specific accusations of wrongdoing against the “Nokia” rapper. Only Spotify is named as a defendant. 

“Every month, under Spotify’s watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake, illegitimate, and/or illegal methods,” like bots, the lawsuit states. Such “mass scale” streaming fraud, it continues, “causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders.” 

Streaming royalties are paid out through a “streamshare” model, where subscription and ad dollars are put into a giant pool, with the money divvied up based on each artist’s share of the total streams. Most of that money already flows upstream to the most successful artists and biggest rights holders. In this type of shared-pool model, fake streams hurt other artists whose shares aren’t inflated. (Spotify and representatives for Drake did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

While the lawsuit suggests that use of bots is widespread on Spotify, the only example it cites pertains to Drake. It claims “voluminous information” which Spotify “knows or should know” proves that a “substantial, non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s approximately 37 billion streams were “inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts.”

This allegedly fraudulent activity took place between January 2022 and September 2025, according to the complaint. It claims an examination of Drake’s streams revealed “abnormal VPN usage” had obscured the location of the bot accounts streaming Drake’s songs. For instance, the lawsuit claims that over a four-day period in 2024, at least 250,000 streams of his 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.”

The lawsuit also alleges that “a large percentage” of accounts streaming Drake’s music were “geographically concentrated around areas whose population could not support” such a high volume of streams. No exact places or numbers were given, though the suit claimed that some streams reportedly originated in areas with “zero residential addresses.” 

The lawsuit also cites “significant and irregular uptick months” for Drake’s songs long after they’ve been released, as well as “slower and less dramatic” decay rates for Drake’s music compared to his contemporaries. (Decay rate refers to a typical streaming pattern where plays of an album or song naturally dwindle in the weeks and months after release.) 

The lawsuit further claims that “the number of streams of Drake’s music attributable to individual accounts is staggering and irregular,” with a “massive amount of accounts listening to Drake’s music” doing so “23 hours a day.” Less than two percent of these users, the lawsuit goes on to claim, account for “roughly 15 percent” of Drake’s streams; and about about nine percent of Drake’s streams “are attributable to less than one percent” of these users. 

“As a result,” the complaint claims, “Drake’s music accumulated far higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had far more ‘users’ than Drake.” 

The lawsuit does not state how the plaintiffs, or their lawyers, obtained this data, nor does it shed any light on how the analysis of Drake’s streaming numbers was conducted.

These allegedly fraudulent streams “generated significant revenues” for Drake and his company Frozen Moments, at the expense of other artists, the lawsuit claims. But it also states that Spotify “deliberately turns a blind eye to fraudulent streaming” for its own benefit. 

While Spotify has taken steps in recent years to combat and tamp down streaming fraud, the lawsuit casts doubt on the efficacy of these measures and Spotify’s own incentives to stop fraud. It suggests that Spotify is particularly vulnerable to bots on the platform’s ad-supported free tier because myriad accounts can be generated without handing over a credit card number. By allegedly allowing bots to run rampant, Spotify can present high stream and user activity numbers to potential advertisers, the lawsuit alleges. 

“For Spotify, more users and music streams means more advertising dollars, so long as the true origin of the streams remains hidden,” the lawsuit states. (Spotify also loses money in the form of royalty payouts whenever fraudulent streaming occurs.)

“Artists across the streaming industry need accurate reporting of streams and effective fraud detection to ensure fair compensation. When streams are artificially inflated on a large scale – as my client’s lawsuit alleges has happened with respect to streams of Drake’s music – it affects the income of countless songwriters, performers, and producers,” Mark Pifko, one of the lawyers with Baron and Budd, who filed the lawsuit on behalf of RBX, tells Rolling Stone. “The lawsuit seeks to address these broader issues, recoup losses for affected musicians, and make the streaming ecosystem as fair and transparent as possible for everyone involved.”

The new lawsuit — and the claims regarding Drake’s music — notably come just weeks after a judge tossed Drake’s lawsuit against Universal Music Group, which contained its own allegations of streaming fraud. Though technically a defamation case, Drake accused his own record label UMG of artificially inflating the popularity of Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us,” marking arguably the most high-profile allegation of streaming fraud to date. UMG denied all of Drake’s allegations and the streaming fraud claims specifically, writing in a March legal filing, “There is no evidence of any such stream manipulation.”

Streaming fraud has been a topic of discussion in the industry for years. While pinpointing just how rampant it is — and calculating corresponding losses — is difficult, most estimates hover in the range of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars. A 2019 Rolling Stone report noted that fake streams could be costing artists $300 million a year. A 2023 study in France found that between one and three percent of all streams in the country were fake. If those numbers held true globally, that would mean royalty losses up to $510 million. Last year, Beatdapp, a streaming fraud detection program, estimated that at least 10 percent of all streams are fraudulent, leading to annual losses of $2 to $3 billion. 

Efforts to crack down on streaming fraud have ramped up around the world. A Danish man was convicted last year, while another individual was arrested in Brazil back in March. Over the summer, officials in Turkey — where the lawsuit says some of the allegedly fraudulent Drake streams originated — started investigating Spotify over several allegations, including bribes for playlist placement and bot streams distorting domestic charts. (A rep for Spotify told Music Business Worldwide at the time that they are “cooperating with the investigation, are actively seeking to understand it, and will work toward a swift, constructive resolution with the Turkish Competition Authority.”) 

And in the U.S., federal prosecutors brought an unprecedented streaming fraud indictment last September against a North Carolina musician named Michael Smith. Smith is accused of using artificial intelligence to generate hundreds of thousands of songs, which he then allegedly streamed with bots. The feds claim that, at one point, Smith had as many as 10,000 active bot accounts streaming his music, and allegedly made over $10 million from this scheme. (Smith has denied the charges.)

Drake filed his first legal claims over “Not Like Us” just two months after Smith was arrested and indicted, and the official defamation suit was brought in January of this year. The streaming fraud allegations against UMG were based on statements from a purported anonymous whistleblower, who appeared on a show by DJ Akademiks, the popular streamer and longtime Drake associate. As stated in Drake’s lawsuit, the whistleblower claimed that Lamar’s label, Insterscope (a UMG subsidiary), paid him $2,500 “via third parties” to “use ‘bots’ to achieve 30 million streams on Spotify in the initial days following” the release of “Not Like Us.” Per the suit, the whistleblower said the goal was “jumpstarting” the song’s spread and making it “a crazy hit” on the platform.

UMG, in a motion to dismiss, noted the whistleblower “directly refuted” his own claim when he said that he was hired by Lamar’s manager, Anthony Saleh. In a revised complaint filed in April, Drake pared down his allegation, claiming “UMG was aware that third parties were using bots to stream the Recording and turned a blind eye, despite having the power to stop such behavior.”

The original suit also alleged that UMG “conferred financial benefits” to Apple so that Siri would “purposely misdirect users to” “Not Like Us” when they asked it to play Drake’s album, Certified Lover Boy. This claim was sourced partly to a viral video posted by HipHopDX’s Jeremy Hecht, who later clarified that Siri appeared capable of pulling up songs based on just lyrics it recognized. Thus, asking Siri to play Certified Lover Boy — without specifying “by Drake” — could conceivably trigger “Not Like Us,” because of Lamar’s line, “Certified loverboy? Certified pedophiles.” 

Even before Drake filed his defamation lawsuit, many legal experts and industry figures were skeptical of his allegations and their viability in court. Speaking with Rolling Stone last year about the petition, Brian Zisook, co-founder of the streaming service Audiomack, even suggested Drake might regret asking Universal to provide documentation of artificial streaming. 

“It’s likely that a lot of artists, Drake included, have benefited [from streaming bots] without their knowledge,” he said. Zisook also noted that many top artists have labels and distribution partners who have “opted into above-board programs like Discovery Mode and have artificially manipulated streams, and the artist has no idea. And they don’t ask questions because it looks good.”

Ultimately, Drake’s suit faltered. A judge summarily dismissed the suit’s defamation accusations, ruling that “Not Like Us,” as a diss track, qualified as “nonactionable opinion.” And while the judge’s decision largely centered on the validity of Drake’s defamation claims — or lack thereof — she also briefly addressed his streaming fraud allegations. She said Drake’s evidence essentially amounts to “Tweets by individual users and reporting from fans,” and called his “reliance on online comments and reporting insufficient to meet the plausibility standard.”

The proposed class action filed Sunday claims damages in excess of $5 million. It’s asking that a federal judge certify the lawsuit as a class action, order Spotify to identify alleged victims, and oversee a jury trial seeking compensatory and punitive damages.

RBX, born Eric Dwayne Collins, helped author Dr. Dre’s West Coast anthem “Let Me Ride” and was featured on several tracks for Dre’s seminal album The Chronic.