RBX sues Spotify over bot streams inflating Drake royalties

A rapper filed a federal class action lawsuit on Sunday accusing Spotify of allowing bots and fake accounts to generate billions of fraudulent streams that inflated the play counts and royalties for Drake’s catalog, the complaint says. The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California by rapper RBX, real name Eric Dwayne Collins, alleges the activity occurred between January 2022 and September 2025 and harmed thousands of other artists by shrinking their share of Spotify’s royalty pool.

The complaint contends that a substantial percentage of Drake’s roughly 37 billion streams were inauthentic and points to patterns it says indicate large-scale manipulation. It cites what it calls abnormal virtual private network activity that obscured the origin of streams and notes one four-day period in 2024 when at least 250,000 plays of Drake’s track No Face appeared to have originated in Turkey but were routed to appear as if from the United Kingdom. The filing also alleges clusters of streams from areas with little residential population and some accounts that streamed Drake’s music for 23 hours a day.

RBX’s attorneys argue Spotify either knew or should have...