Spotify Sued Over 'Billions' of Fraudulent Drake Streams

A new class-action lawsuit accuses Spotify of allowing billions of fraudulent Drake streams generated by bots between 2022 and 2025, allegedly inflating his royalties at the expense of other artists. 'Spotify pays streaming royalties using a 'pro-rata' model based on an artist's market share,' notes Consequence. 'Each month, revenue from subscriptions and ads is collected into a single, fixed 'pot' of money, which is then distributed to rights holders based on their percentage of the platform's total streams. Because this pot is fixed, an artist who artificially inflates their numbers through bots would dilute the value of every legitimate stream. This allows them to take a larger share of the pot than they earned, effectively siphoning royalties that should have gone to other artists.' From the report: According to Rolling Stone, the lawsuit alleges bot use is a widespread problem on Spotify. However, Drake is the only example named, based on 'voluminous information' which the company 'knows or should know' that proves a 'substantial, non-trivial percentage' of his approximately 37 billion streams were 'inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts.'

The complaint claims this alleged fraudulent activity took place between 'January 2022 and September 2025,' with an examination of 'abnormal VPN usage' revealing at least 250,000 streams of Drake's song 'No Face' during a four-day period in 2024 were actually from Turkey 'but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in [an] attempt to obscure their origins.' Other notable allegations in the lawsuit are that 'a large percentage' of accounts were concentrated in areas where the population could not support such a high volume of streams, including those with 'zero residential addresses.' The suit also points to 'significant and irregular uptick months' for Drake's songs long after their release, as well as a 'slower and less dramatic' downtick in streams compared to other artists.

Noting a 'staggering and irregular' streaming of Drake's music by individuals, the suit also claims there are a 'massive amount of accounts' listening to his songs '23 hours a day.' Less than 2% of those users account for 'roughly 15 percent' of his streams. 'Drake's music accumulated far higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had far more 'users' than Drake,' the lawsuit concludes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.