November 3, 2025
RBX claims the corporate is benefitting from “billions of fraudulent streams” attributed to the Canadian rapper
Recording artist RBX, who was as soon as in Dr. Dre’s Aftermath Leisure and Dying Row Information camp, has sued streaming platform Spotify, accusing the corporate of benefitting from “billions of fraudulent streams” attributed to Canadian rapper Drake.
In line with Pitchfork, the paperwork was filed as a class-action lawsuit (RBX is listed because the lead plaintiff) claiming that the corporate turned a blind eye to the manipulation of bots that artificially drive streams, thereby depriving different artists of income below the present enterprise mannequin. On account of artificially inflated numbers, these different artists don’t obtain their proportional share of Spotify’s royalty pool, as their share is lowered.
Lawyer Mark Pifko, who’s representing RBX, stated in a written assertion, “Not everybody who makes a dwelling within the music enterprise is a family title like Taylor Swift—there are literally thousands of songwriters, performers, and producers who earn income from music streaming who you’ve by no means heard of. These persons are the spine of the music enterprise, and this case is about them.”
The lawsuit doesn’t goal Drake; Spotify is the one defendant named.
Filed Nov. 2 in a California federal court docket, the alleged bot-driven streaming fraud “causes large monetary hurt to legit artists” and different rights-holders, as Drake’s streaming numbers have been used for instance of widespread streaming fraud.
Within the lawsuit, it alleges {that a} “non-trivial proportion” of Drake’s 37 billion streams seemed to be the work of a sprawling community of “Bot Accounts.” They state that the proof exhibits “irregular VPN utilization” in brief time spans with excessive streaming quantity. An instance given said that in a interval in 2024, 250,000 streams of Drake’s “No Face” registered in the UK have been geo-mapped again to Turkey.
“If these streams are usually not legit, then Drake obtained royalties that Spotify ought to have paid out to different artists. They estimate that the price of “the fraudulent boosting of Drake’s music is estimated to be within the a whole lot of thousands and thousands of {dollars}.” Spotify has little incentive to crack down on faux streams as a result of bot accounts increase person figures and assist them promote advertisements.
Spotify responded by saying that the streaming service “on no account advantages from the industry-wide problem of synthetic streaming.”
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