Spotify sued over fake Drake streams

According to the plaintiff, Spotify turned a blind eye to bot activity in order to artificially inflate user engagement statistics and attract more advertising revenue. Meanwhile, legitimate artists lost their share of royalties, since payments on the platform are distributed proportionally based on total streams.

The pro-rata model used by most music streaming platforms pools all subscription fees into a single fund, which is then distributed according to each artist’s share of total streams. This means revenue goes not to the artists a user actually listens to, but to those who dominate global listening totals. As a result, top-charting musicians like Drake or Taylor Swift capture a disproportionate share of income, while smaller or independent artists receive less.

According to the lawsuit, between January 2022 and September 2025, approximately 37 billion out of Drake's 120 billion total streams were generated by bots.

RBX's lawyers point to suspicious patterns: accounts that listened exclusively to Drake for 23 hours a day, and strange spikes in popularity for old tracks months or even years after release.

The lawsuit also describes geographic anomalies. Bot networks used VPNs to mask their actual locations, for example, over four days in 2024, a quarter million streams of the track "No Face" were routed through Türkiye but recorded as streams from the United Kingdom. Some regions registered hundreds of millions of plays despite having zero residential addresses.

There were cases where accounts supposedly streamed consecutive tracks from locations thousands of kilometers apart within seconds, a physically impossible scenario.

RBX's attorneys estimate that fake Drake streams may have cost other musicians "hundreds of millions of dollars" in lost revenue. Attorney Mark Pifko emphasized that independent artists, who form the backbone of the music industry and rely on modest digital income, were the ones who suffered most.

Spotify categorically denies the allegations. A company spokesperson stated that the platform heavily invests in technologies to detect fake streams, blocks royalties for suspicious tracks, and imposes penalties.

The court must now determine whether RBX's allegations can be substantiated through data analysis and Spotify's internal documents.

Earlier, Kazinform News Agency reported that Spotify introduced new AI safeguards to protect artists and listeners.