Spotify Lawsuit Alleges Billions of Streams, Including Some of Drake’s, Are Fraudulent

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A proposed class action lawsuit claims that Spotify has done nothing to address widespread fraudulent streams on its platform, which is inundated with billions of fake streams, including for some of the world’s most famous artists, generated by bots each month.

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The 31-page Spotify lawsuit contends that the platform “deliberately turns a blind eye” to the “bots” acting as phantom accounts designed to artificially inflate the number of streams for certain artists. The class action suit charges that Spotify is “all too happy” to look the other way when it comes to fake bot streams, given that the more users—including fake ones— that the platform has, the more ads Spotify can sell, and the more profit the defendant can report to shareholders.

Moreover, bot streams help boost the revenue share for certain artists and publishers, while other parties whose streams are from real users are left behind financially, the filing relays.

“This fraudulent, and often bot-supported streaming dramatically and improperly increases the revenue share for a select number of artists and publishers, while it diminishes the shares for other Rights Holders whose music is streamed by legitimate users,” the case states. “In other words, by allowing this fraudulent streaming to take place, through negligence and/or willful blindness, Spotify breaches the duties it owes to Rights Holders and causes them substantial financial harm.”

Spotify’s business model is based on royalties, whereby every time a song or podcast is streamed, the rights holders behind the content are compensated, the lawsuit explains. Per the suit, this money is taken from Spotify’s revenue pool—which is made up from ad revenue and subscription fees—and rights holders are given a part of the pool based on their percentage of content streamed in comparison to the fixed total amount of content streamed on the entire platform.

Thus, the more streams a song or podcast receives, the bigger chunk of the revenue pool the rights holder will receive, the complaint says.

According to the case, bots are typically designed to “mimic human behavior and resemble real social media or streaming accounts” to avoid notice, and due to the nature of Spotify, which does require a credit card to set up an account, vendors can unleash “thousands, and in some cases, many more Bots at any one time” across the platform.

In November 2023, Spotify announced its intention to change its policies in an effort to detect, mitigate and remove artificial streaming activity to improve the streaming platform for artists, the lawsuit says. Despite these representations, however, it was speculated that artificial streaming continued to occur on Spotify’s platform and that its policies did not cover the full extent of the issue, the complaint shares.

Notably, the case contends that the artist Aubrey Drake Graham, better known as just Drake, is a prominent artist who benefits from bot activity. In September 2025, Drake became the first artist to nominally achieve 120 billion total streams on Spotify. However, the lawsuit says that investigation suggests that a “substantial” portion of that activity appeared to be attributed to bot accounts that streamed songs for hours on end from obscure, poorly disguised locations.

“Plaintiff is informed and believes that an examination of Drake’s music streams reveals abnormal VPN usage, seemingly designed to obscure the true geographic origins of the Bot Accounts that were streaming his songs,” the lawsuit says.

The plaintiff of the case is Eric Dwayne Collins, otherwise known as the rapper RBX, who resides in California. RBX states in the suit that he aims to “bring justice for his brother and sister creators and entertainers” who may be too afraid or unable to challenge the defendant.

The Spotify class action lawsuit looks to cover all United States residents who, between January 1, 2018 and the present, owned royalty rights for content on Spotify and whose subscription revenue shares were diminished as a result of Spotify’s allegedly wrongful conduct.

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