Photo Credit: Drake (Instagram)
A class action lawsuit against Spotify alleges the company has ignored “mass-scale” fraudulent streams of Drake’s catalog.
Spotify faces a new class action lawsuit that alleges the company has “turned a blind eye” to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming” on its platform. The lawsuit suggests that the use of bots is widespread on Spotify, but the only example it cites pertains to Drake.
Filed in California District Court last night with rapper RBX (who is a cousin of Snoop Dogg) named as the lead plaintiff, the lawsuit alleges that foul play has led to Drake’s exorbitant streaming numbers. However, there are no specific accusations of wrongdoing listed against Drake—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,” including bots, the lawsuit reads. This “mass-scale” streaming fraud “causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders.”
The lawsuit claims that “voluminous information,” which Spotify “knows or should know,” proves that a “substantial” percentage of Drake’s 37 billion-ish streams “appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of bot accounts.”
Allegedly, this so-called fraudulent activity took place between January 2022 and September 2025. The lawsuit alleges that an examination of Drake’s streams revealed “abnormal VPN usage” that hid the location of the bot accounts streaming the music. For example, the lawsuit cites a four-day period in 2024 where at least 250,000 streams of Drake’s track “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.”
Further, the lawsuit claims a “large percentage” of accounts streaming Drake’s music were “geographically concentrated” in areas whose population could not support “such a high volume of streams.” However, no exact places or numbers were cited—but the filing claims that some streams originated in areas with no residential addresses.
“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,” the lawsuit claims, citing staggering numbers of streams attributable to individual accounts—less than two percent of Drake’s total listeners reportedly account for “roughly 15 percent” of his streams.
Curiously, the lawsuit does not state how the plaintiffs obtained this data, or how the analysis of Drake’s streaming numbers was conducted. But these allegedly fraudulent streams “generated significant revenue” for Drake and his company at the expense of other artists, the filing claims.
But the filing also asserts that Spotify deliberately ignores such streaming. While Spotify has taken steps to combat streaming fraud in recent years, the lawsuit suggests the efficacy of these measures is questionable.
“For Spotify, more users and music streams means more advertising dollars, so long as the true origin of the streams remains hidden,” the lawsuit reads.
Meanwhile, Spotify refuted these allegations in a statement from a company spokesperson. “Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming,” they 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,” Spotify’s spokesperson continued.
Streaming fraud proliferates as a major topic of discussion throughout the industry. But whether DSPs like Spotify have taken reasonable measures to combat the issue is debatable, as bot creators and fraudsters are constantly finding new ways to manipulate a given system.
