Billions of Fake Drake Streams? Spotify Hit With Explosive Lawsuit

A new federal class action lawsuit filed in California alleges that Spotify allowed billions of fraudulent streams on its platform between January 2022 and September 2025, most tied to songs by Aubrey Drake Graham, the service’s most-streamed artist of all time.​

 

The case, Collins v. Spotify USA Inc., was brought by rap artist Eric Dwayne Collins, known as RBX, on behalf of all recording artists, songwriters, and rights holders whose royalties are paid from Spotify’s monthly revenue pool.​

 

At the heart of the complaint is a clear accusation. Spotify knew or should have known that bots and fake accounts were distorting its stream counts and depriving real creators of revenue.​

 

The complaint claims a substantial percentage of Drake’s approximately 37 billion streams during that period were fake.

 

It provides examples of how this is allegedly supposed to work.

• VPN masking: Over 250,000 streams of Drake’s song "No Face" in 2024 appeared to originate from Turkey but were rerouted through UK VPNs to conceal their true source.

• Geographic anomalies: Large clusters of plays came from areas with no residential addresses and populations far too small to support the number of streams.

• Geohash data: About ten percent of Drake’s streams came from accounts that appeared to travel fifteen thousand kilometers a month, or moved between songs separated by only seconds but thousands of kilometers apart.

• Abnormal patterns: Instead of the regular rise and fall seen after a release, Drake’s songs showed irregular surges months or years later and unusually slow declines.

• Listening time irregularities: Many accounts streamed Drake for twenty-three hours a day. Fewer than two percent of users generated about fifteen percent of his plays. Less than one percent accounted for about nine percent of all streams.

 

The lawsuit states that these patterns were easily identifiable within Spotify’s own systems, yet the company failed to take action.

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The Alleged Motive

Spotify’s business model relies on the total number of monthly active users and total streams. Both are key metrics for Wall Street and advertisers.

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The lawsuit claims Spotify turned a blind eye to fake streams because inflated numbers meant higher advertising revenue, stronger investor reports, and the appearance of continuous growth.​

 

Even as Spotify announced new anti-fraud policies in 2023 and 2024, including minimum stream thresholds and penalties for distributors, the lawsuit calls those changes window dressing and says they were too late and too weak.

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What This Means for Songwriters

Spotify pays royalties from a finite monthly revenue pool. Every fake stream changes how that pool is divided. When bots boost one artist’s numbers, everyone else’s percentage of the pool gets smaller.

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The complaint estimates that hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties were redirected to Drake while other rights holders were underpaid.

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The filing quotes a line from a previous case involving Drake himself: “Streaming and licensing is a zero-sum game.”

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What RBX and the Class Want

The class action seeks to have the court award compensatory and punitive damages for the diminished royalty shares. It also seeks restitution and disgorgement of Spotify’s advertising and subscription profits that came from inflated stream counts.

 

RBX and his legal team are also requesting an injunction that would compel Spotify to identify victims of the fraud, repay them, and reform its systems for detecting fake streams.​

 

This case strikes at the heart of the streaming economy. If the allegations are factual, it means that the very data used to determine who gets paid is unreliable.

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For creatives who already earn fractions of a cent per play, the idea that bots and fake accounts might be cutting into that income adds insult to injury. It also undermines trust in an industry that is already opaque and unfair to the people who create the music.