The ruling rejected accusations that Spotify broke the law by turning a "blind eye" to bot-fueled fake streams for major artists, but the case isn't quite over yet.
A federal judge has tossed out a class action lawsuit claiming Spotify turns a “blind eye” to bots and allows billions of fake streams of Drake and other stars.
A rapper named RBX (Eric Collins) sued Spotify last year, accusing the music streaming giant of essentially ignoring the problem of streaming fraud by major artists, thus depriving tens of thousands of others of fair royalties. He claimed the company’s anti-fraud rules were “inadequate at best.”
But in a decision Monday (June 22), Judge Josephine Staton ruled that those allegations were too “vague” and unsupported to move ahead in court: “Plaintiff has failed to plausibly allege that the harm he has suffered outweighs any justification Spotify may have for maintaining its current policies regarding artificial streaming.”
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Though the ruling (obtained and first reported by Billboard) dismissed RBX’s case against Spotify, the judge gave him a chance to refile it with changes aimed at fixing the problems. His lawyers confirmed to Billboard on Monday that they would do so, but declined to comment further.
Spotify has previously denied any wrongdoing, saying that it “in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming” and has implemented “best-in-class systems to combat it.” The company did not return a request for comment on Monday’s ruling.
Streaming fraud on platforms like Spotify is a longstanding problem for the music business, made more challenging in recent years by artificial intelligence. By some estimates, several percentage points of all streams are inauthentic, amounting to billions of monthly plays. And since royalties on digital services are divvied up among rightsholders from a finite pie, such phony numbers siphon off revenue from legitimate streams.
Spotify has said it heavily invests in systems to detect, remove and penalize fake streams. When prosecutors indicted a North Carolina man in 2024 for stealing $10 million through an AI-powered streaming fraud scheme, they claimed only $60,000 of it came from Spotify, which the company has said shows “how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform.”
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But in November, lawyers for Collins claimed that Spotify’s policies against fake streams were “nothing more than window dressing,” and that the company would prefer to do nothing because bots help the company’s bottom line.
“The more users (including fake users) Spotify has, the more advertisements it can sell, the more profits the company can report, all of which serves to increase the purported value delivered to shareholders,” the rapper’s lawyers wrote at the time.
The lawsuit took particular aim at Drake. Though the superstar was not named in the lawsuit nor formally accused of any wrongdoing, the case repeatedly mentioned him as emblematic of the broader problem. “Billions of fraudulent streams have been generated with respect to songs of ‘the most streamed artist of all time,’ Aubrey Drake Graham, professionally known as Drake,” RBX’s lawyers wrote.
In Monday’s ruling, however, Judge Staton rejected that case. RBX accused Spotify of legal negligence, meaning the company caused him and others harm by failing to take steps it should have taken. But the judge said he had failed to show that Spotify had any duty to protect him from bots in the first place — a key requirement in any negligence lawsuit.
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The judge also rejected the lawsuit’s other claim: that Spotify had violated California’s Unfair Competition Law by failing to stop fake streams. And in doing so, she seemed to question RBX’s heavy focus on Drake.
“Although plaintiff alleges that Spotify should be doing more, plaintiff does not identify the degree of financial impact artificial streaming has on artists like plaintiff,” Judge Staton wrote. “Plaintiff’s complaint focuses almost exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist’s music, so the extent to which plaintiff is injured by artificial streaming as a whole is unclear.”
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Attorneys for RBX can refile an updated version of the case in the next 21 days.
