A Spotify billboard in Tokyo. Photo Credit: Chansu Shin
Following his initial class action’s dismissal, rapper RBX has fired off an amended complaint against Spotify over its alleged failure to prevent largescale streaming fraud on “the catalogs of its highest-volume, ‘A-list,’ most lucrative artists such as Drake.”
RBX (real name Eric Collins) just recently submitted his retooled suit to a California federal court, once again naming Spotify, not Drake himself, as the lone defendant. At the top level, the plaintiff’s core streaming manipulation allegations are consistent across both the suit’s iterations.
But in keeping with the shortcomings identified in the presiding judge’s dismissal order – chief among them the absence of evidence demonstrating that Spotify had misled with its fraud-prevention and -detection commitments – the amended action explores a number of additional angles.
First, an alleged platform-wide failure to curb fake streams at the expense of non-superstar artists has taken center stage. The way RBX sees things, Spotify aggressively sniffs out fraud on indie releases but not the projects of Drake and others – and allegedly “diverted at least $600 million in royalties away from music rights holders” across 48 months as a result.
(RBX “is informed and believes that this conduct is ongoing and continues into the present,” the legal text elaborates. “The 48-month period is simply a sampling period used to identify the scope and nature of some of the fraud.”)
“Spotify does not apply its anti-fraud policies evenhandedly” and “only enforces them selectively when it benefits Spotify,” according to the complaint. “For example, Spotify rigorously polices the low end of its streaming platform, where enforcement costs Spotify nothing and in fact, benefits its bottom line by imposing minimum-stream and unique listener thresholds that strip royalties from emerging and independent artists.
“Yet, at the same time, Spotify declines to apply that same scrutiny to artificial streaming that inflates the catalogs of its highest-volume, ‘A-list,’ most lucrative artists such as Drake, the very accounts whose streams drive Spotify’s reported monthly active users, engagement metrics, and advertising revenue,” the suit reads.
Moreover, the filing party is adamant that during the relevant window, “a substantial, non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s approximately 37 billion streams derived from bots – meaning that there was a significant alleged impact on the royalty pool and especially indies.
(The actual fraud allegations appear to be largely the same: “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,” to name one. Plus, “a massive amount of the accounts listening to Drake’s music…listened exclusively to Drake’s music for 23 hours a day.”)
In terms of other examples of alleged fraud, within a six-month stretch, a years-old album from an act that the suit dubs “Artist A” is said to have experienced “a slower decay rate than a new album released by Taylor Swift.”
“Such anomalous decay rates, like those exhibited by Artirst [sic] A and Drake, are indicative of fraudulent streaming,” per the suit, which also mentions a recent instance of streaming fraud on Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings.”
“Spotify’s concealment was not limited to the mere existence and magnitude of the fraud,” another paragraph maintains. “Spotify also failed to disclose that it enforces its anti-fraud policies selectively against emerging and independent artists at the bottom of the platform, while declining to remove the artificial streams that inflate the catalogs of its high-volume, most profitable artists.”
Finally, the amended complaint describes a simplified proposed class covering U.S.-based rightsholders who between 2018 and the present “possessed royalties rights for on-demand digital media content that was hosted by Spotify” and who were allegedly shortchanged by the purported “wrongful conduct.”
Besides seeking injunctive relief compelling “Spotify to update their account creation interface to employ industry standard protocols” like CAPTCHAs, RBX is demanding the appointment of “an independent monitor” to identify the alleged streaming fraud victims.
In the bigger picture, venue disputes are playing out in two separate streaming fraud battles. First, Drake, betting platform Stake, and others are pushing to shift a suit, most recently filed in the Monmouth County Superior Court, to a federal court. And Spotify is looking to do the same in an ugly showdown with artist and attorney Mark Kratter.
