Spotify hit with lawsuit over 'billions' of fake Drake streams

A lawsuit filed in California District Court on Sunday alleges Spotify streaming fraud is taking place at a "mass scale," and that one artist in particular has benefited from "billions" of fake streams.

2

The lawsuit names rapper Eric Dwayne Collins, "RBX," the cousin of Snoop Dogg, as the lead plaintiff and Spotify as the defendant. The class-action lawsuit alleges that under Spotify's watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake sources, such as bots or other illegal methods. The suit states this streaming fraud "causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders."

For those who don't know how Spotify pays artists on its platform, streaming royalties are paid out through what is called a "streamshare" model, which involves all subscription and ad money placed into a big pool. That money is then divided up and paid out to artists based on the total number of streams their music receives.

Rolling Stone reports the majority of that money flows upstream to the most successful artists and biggest rights holders, which means that if fake streams are occurring for artists, it's taking potential revenue away from artists whose music isn't being artificially inflated.

The lawsuit claims that botted streams are a widespread issue across Spotify, but only cites one example, Drake. The suit claims "voluminous information" which Spotify "knows or should know" proves that a "substantial, non-trivial percentage" of Drake's 37 billion streams were "inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts."

The suit claims the fraudulent activity on Drake's profile occurred during January 2022 and September 2025, and that after an examination of Drake's streams, "abnormal VPN usage" was discovered. More specifically, the suit states that over a four-day period in 2024, at least 250,000 streams of Drake's song "No Face" were traced to Turkey, "but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in [an] attempt to obscure their origins."

The lawsuit doesn't state how the plaintiff or the lawyers behind the suit acquired this internal data on Drake's profile, nor the process of analyzing the streaming data.