Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Accusing Spotify of Allowing Fake Drake Streams
A federal judge has thrown out a class-action lawsuit that accused Spotify of letting fake bot streams inflate the numbers for Drake and other major artists. Judge Josephine Staton dismissed the case with prejudice, a legal term meaning the claims cannot be filed again in the same form.
The case was brought by the rapper RBX, whose legal name is Eric Collins. He argued that Spotify turned a "blind eye" to streaming fraud by big names, and that this cost other artists their fair share of royalties, the payments musicians receive when their songs are played. The complaint alleged billions of bot-generated plays had been counted.
Drake was not a defendant. The complaint mentioned him many times, though, using him as an example of the alleged fraud. Spotify was the only company named.
This was not the first time the case had been dismissed. Judge Staton earlier ruled the complaint too "vague," but she gave RBX the chance to rewrite his claims. The new ruling goes further and rejects the central arguments.
On the negligence claim, the judge found that Spotify owed RBX no special duty to protect him from bots. Negligence claims generally require a company to have a responsibility toward the person who sued it, and the judge did not find one here.
RBX also relied on California's Unfair Competition Law, which bans misleading business practices. The judge rejected that claim too. She found Spotify had made no deceptive statements about its anti-bot policies.
For listeners, the stakes are easy to picture. Streaming pays artists by the play, so every fake stream takes a small amount from the total pool that honest plays would have earned. Whether that happens at scale, and who is responsible, is a question this ruling does not settle. It ends this lawsuit on the legal grounds the judge has now considered.
Fraud in streaming has been a recurring topic for the industry, with platforms regularly saying they remove artificial plays. This ruling does not decide whether those systems work. It decides only that the claims in this particular complaint could not proceed.
