by Cedric ‘BIG CED’ Thornton
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 Loss of life Row Data camp, has sued streaming platform Spotify, accusing the corporate of benefitting from “billions of fraudulent streams” attributed to Canadian rapper Drake.
Based on 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 beneath the present enterprise mannequin. Resulting from artificially inflated numbers, these different artists don’t obtain their proportional share of Spotify’s royalty pool, as their share is decreased.
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 millions of songwriters, performers, and producers who earn income from music streaming who you’ve by no means heard of. These individuals 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 courtroom, the alleged bot-driven streaming fraud “causes huge monetary hurt to reliable artists” and different rights-holders, as Drake’s streaming numbers had been used for instance of widespread streaming fraud.
Within the lawsuit, it alleges {that a} “non-trivial proportion” of Drake’s 37 billion streams gave the impression 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 had been geo-mapped again to Turkey.
“If these streams aren’t reliable, 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 lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.” Spotify has little incentive to crack down on faux streams as a result of bot accounts increase consumer figures and assist them promote adverts.
Spotify responded by saying that the streaming service “on no account advantages from the industry-wide problem of synthetic streaming.”
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