A class-action lawsuit filed against Spotify alleges that the streaming giant has ignored, and subsequently profited from, billions of fraudulent streams of Drake's music.
The lawsuit, filed to California’s District Court on Sunday 2nd November, was first reported by Rolling Stone and accuses Spotify of having "turned a blind eye" to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming".
“Every month, under Spotify’s watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake, illegitimate, and/or illegal methods", states the lawsuit. "[This] causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rights holders.”
Although Drake is mentioned, he is not being implicated or sued as part of the case, whose lead plaintiff is reported to be American rapper RBX (also Snoop Dogg’s cousin). Spotify is the sole defendant and is alleged to have overlooked fraudulent streams generated via the use of bots, which in turn has increased the platform's ad revenue.
The lawsuit references examination of Drake's streaming figures from January 2022 to September 2025, which apparently show signs of “abnormal VPN usage", and "a substantial, non-trivial percentage [which are] inauthentic and appear to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts.”
One specific example identified took place in 2024, where Drake's track No Face was streamed 250,000 times from a location in Turkey, but “falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in attempt to obscure their origins.”
With this in mind, the lawsuit claims that Drake's reported 37 billion streams have been artificially inflated. “For Spotify, more users and music streams means more advertising dollars, so long as the true origin of the streams remains hidden…”
In response to the lawsuit, Spotify has said “We cannot comment on pending litigation. However, Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming.”
“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.”
