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Spotify is facing a major class action lawsuit over allegations that the streaming giant has allowed billions of fake, bot-generated streams on its platform, cheating legitimate artists out of millions in royalties. The lawsuit was filed in California federal court on Sunday, November 2, with Spotify as the sole defendant.
The complaint claims Spotify has failed to stop widespread streaming fraud, which artificially inflates the company’s user numbers and boosts its advertising revenue and stock value. Meanwhile, this fraud is shrinking the royalty pool that gets divided among real musicians.
The lawsuit was filed by veteran West Coast rapper RBX (Eric Dwayne Collins), a founding figure in West Coast hip-hop and cousin of Snoop Dogg. Collins argues that Spotify’s royalty system is broken. The platform uses a “pro rata” model, where the total royalty pool gets divided based on each artist’s percentage of overall streams. When bots generate fake streams, they steal a piece of that pool, reducing payouts for everyone else. The lawsuit estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars in streaming revenue have been diverted from legitimate artists because of this fraud.
Drake is named in the lawsuit as a major beneficiary of the alleged fraud. The complaint claims that between January 2022 and September 2025, a significant percentage of Drake’s roughly 37 billion Spotify streams were fake. The lawsuit cites data showing some of Drake’s streams came from “areas with zero residential addresses” and that 250,000 streams of one song were falsely geo-tagged to the UK using VPNs to hide their actual origin in Turkey. The suit alleges Drake’s music racked up far higher total streams compared to other popular artists, even though those artists had more unique listeners.
Spotify has pushed back on these claims. In a statement, a company spokesperson said, “We cannot comment on pending litigation. However, Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming.” The company pointed to its anti-fraud systems, which it says remove fake streams and withhold royalties, and noted these systems worked in limiting the damage from a $10 million fraud case last year.
Adding to the drama, Drake recently filed his own lawsuit against Universal Music Group (UMG), claiming UMG and Spotify teamed up to artificially inflate streams of Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.” That lawsuit was dismissed, and Drake is currently appealing.
This class action lawsuit suggests Spotify has prioritized growth over fair pay, leaving the music industry to deal with the fallout from billions of fake streams. The outcome could force major changes in how streaming services police their platforms and distribute royalties.
