Judge dismisses class action over alleged fake Drake streams

A federal judge has dismissed a proposed class action lawsuit that accused Spotify of allowing billions of artificially generated streams to inflate play counts for major artists, including Drake. U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton granted Spotify’s motion to dismiss the case on Monday, June 22, 2026, in the Central District of California.

The lawsuit was filed in November 2025 by rapper Eric Dwayne Collins, known professionally as RBX. He alleged that Spotify’s failure to curb mass-scale fraudulent streaming diverted royalties from a finite revenue pool, harming independent and lesser-known artists. The complaint specifically pointed to Drake, described as Spotify’s most-streamed artist of all time, as a central example. It claimed a substantial percentage of the billions of streams Drake accumulated between January 2022 and September 2025 were inauthentic, generated by a network of bot accounts using methods like VPNs to disguise their origin. Drake was not named as a defendant and was not accused of any wrongdoing.

In her ruling, Judge Staton found that Collins had not shown Spotify owed him a legal duty to protect him from third-party bots, a key requirement for his...