TL;DR:
A new class action lawsuit accuses Spotify of letting fake “bot” listeners flood its platform with artificial streams. The filing says this fraud boosts the royalty share for a tiny set of artists (centered on the alleged PDF file known as Drake) while draining hundreds of millions of dollars from other rights holders who rely on real fans and real plays. The complaint argues that Spotify has every incentive to look the other way, because inflated user and stream counts help the company sell more ads, impress Wall Street, and grow its power over the music business.
If you keep reading, you will see how the lawsuit says this system works, who loses money, and what it reveals about a digital economy that treats artists as expendable inputs in a profit machine.
Table of Contents
- Introduction: When Fake Streams Replace Real Pay
- Inside the Allegations: Corporate Misconduct on Spotify
- Timeline of What Allegedly Went Wrong
- Regulatory Capture & Loopholes in the Streaming Economy
- Profit-Maximization at All Costs
- Economic Fallout for Artists and Rights Holders
- Community Impact: A Music Ecosystem Undermined
- The PR Machine and Corporate Spin
- Legal Minimalism and the Compliance Game
- How Capitalism Rewards Delay and Inaction
- Monetizing Harm: Turning Fake Plays into Real Money
- Profiting from Complexity in Royalty Systems
- Corporate Accountability Fails the Public
- Pathways for Reform & Artist Power
- This Is the System Working as Intended
- Conclusion: Serious Claims, Systemic Stakes
Introduction: When Fake Streams Replace Real Pay
The lawsuit paints a stark picture. It alleges that every month, “billions of fraudulent streams” are generated on Spotify through fake accounts and automated bots. These streams do not come from real fans and real listening. They allegedly come from scripts and bot farms that exist to game Spotify’s system.
The filing says this fake activity shifts a finite royalty pool away from artists, songwriters, and producers who earned their audiences and toward those whose numbers are artificially inflated. The lawsuit calls this a “hustle” that reaches the heart of the streaming economy: the company’s own revenue model.
According to the lawsuit, Spotify benefits from this system because more streams (whether real or fake) mean a bigger audience on paper, more ads sold, and a more attractive story for investors. The filing describes a platform that markets itself as a champion of “fair” pay for artists while allegedly allowing large-scale fraud that harms the very people who create the music.
Inside the Allegations: Corporate Misconduct on Spotify
A zero-sum royalty pool
The lawsuit focuses on Spotify’s basic setup. The company collects money from subscriber fees and advertising and puts this into a monthly “revenue pool.” Rights holders (artists, songwriters, publishers, labels) get paid based on their “streamshare,” which is their percentage of total plays on the platform in that month.
If one artist’s share of total streams goes up, everyone else’s share goes down. The legal complaint quotes prior legal language from Drake himself describing streaming and licensing as “a zero-sum game.” In that kind of system, fake streams for one artist translate directly into less money for everyone else.
The core accusation
The lawsuit claims that:
- Fake accounts and automated “bots” repeatedly play certain songs to inflate their numbers.
- These bots allegedly play a major role in the streaming numbers for Drake, who the complaint describes as “the most streamed artist of all time” on Spotify and the first to reach a nominal total of 120 billion streams in September 2025.
- Between January 2022 and September 2025, the filing claims that a substantial, non-trivial share of roughly 37 billion streams of Drake’s music came from inauthentic activity linked to bot networks.
- The lawsuit estimates that the resulting misallocation of royalties to Drake’s rights holders (Drake and his company Frozen Moments, LLC) runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars at the expense of other rights holders.
The lawsuit argues that Spotify had the data and the tools to detect these patterns, that the anomalies were “statistically improbable,” and that leaving them in place violated basic duties to the artists whose work funds the platform.
Timeline of What Allegedly Went Wrong
Alleged key events and policies in the Spotify bot-streaming case
| Year / Date | Event or Allegation |
|---|---|
| January 1, 2018–Present | Proposed class period for U.S. rights holders whose royalties were allegedly reduced. |
| January 2022–Sept 2025 | Period where Drake’s ~37 billion Spotify streams allegedly include substantial fake activity driven by bots. |
| 2023 | Spotify reports paying more than $9 billion in royalties to music labels and producers. |
| November 2023 | Spotify announces new policies aimed at protecting the music royalty ecosystem, including anti-fraud measures. |
| April 2024 (policy start) | New rule takes effect: tracks need at least 1,000 streams in the last 12 months to be counted in the royalty pool, plus a minimum number of unique listeners. |
| Four-day period in 2024 | At least 250,000 streams of Drake’s song “No Face” allegedly originate in Turkey and are re-routed via VPNs to appear as if they came from the U.K. |
| Early 2025 (planned) | Spotify says it will begin charging labels and distributors per track when “flagrant” artificial streaming is detected. |
| Q2 2025 | Spotify reports 696 million monthly active users and 276 million premium subscribers worldwide. |
| September 2025 | Drake becomes the first artist to nominally hit 120 billion total streams on Spotify. |
| November 2, 2025 | Eric “RBX” Collins files this class action complaint in federal court. |
The legal complaint argues that, even as Spotify rolled out new policies on paper, large-scale bot streaming kept distorting the royalty pool in practice.
Regulatory Capture & Loopholes in the Streaming Economy
In this case, “regulation” does not come from a public agency. It comes from Spotify itself. The company sets the rules of the market, controls the data, and decides how and when to enforce its own anti-fraud policies.
According to the complaint, Spotify publicly declares that it:
- Prohibits artificial streaming and bot activity.
- Invests “significant engineering resources” into detecting and removing fake streams.
- Conducts daily “cleaning” to remove artificial plays from public numbers.
- Introduces thresholds for track eligibility and unique listeners to protect royalty calculations.
At the same time, the lawsuit says that “multiple instances of artificial streaming activity” continue and that this shows a detection system that is “ineffective, inconsistently applied, and/or insufficient.”
This is a classic pattern of private rulemaking under neoliberal capitalism. The dominant platform sets its own standards, publishes reassuring language about “integrity” and “fairness,” and keeps full control over the metrics that determine who gets paid. When a company polices itself and holds the data, meaningful oversight becomes almost impossible for outsiders.
Profit-Maximization at All Costs
How fake streams help the platform’s bottom line
The complaint describes a straightforward business incentive. Spotify’s success story rests on growth in:
- Monthly active users (MAUs)
- Premium subscribers
- Total streams
The company’s own securities filings, quoted in the lawsuit, tout 696 million MAUs and stress that MAUs are a key “performance indicator” for revenue and advertising. Spotify connects user engagement to more opportunities to sell ads and to retain paying subscribers.
The filing draws a direct line from this pressure to the company’s attitude toward bots:
- More accounts (real or fake) support higher MAU and stream numbers.
- More streams, even if driven by bots, give Spotify more leverage with advertisers.
- Removing huge volumes of fraudulent streams would shrink reported activity and potentially reduce advertising revenue.
The lawsuit argues that this incentive helps explain Spotify’s alleged “blind eye” to widespread streaming fraud. The company publicly frames bots as a threat to artists while allegedly benefiting from the inflated numbers they create.
Economic Fallout for Artists and Rights Holders
A rigged zero-sum game
Because Spotify uses a finite revenue pool divided by percentage of total streams, every fake play has a human cost. The complaint describes the mechanics in simple terms:
- The pool is fixed for a given month.
- An artist’s share depends on how many of that month’s total streams go to their catalog.
- When bots inflate one artist’s streams, that artist’s share of the pool grows.
- Everyone else’s share shrinks, even if their own real streams stay the same.
The lawsuit emphasizes that legitimate rights holders (artists, songwriters, producers, labels) lose money even when their fans listen in good faith. Their slice of the pie gets smaller because the total pie is weighed down by fake servings going to a narrow group of beneficiaries.
The complaint estimates that, for Drake’s catalog alone, the amount of streaming revenue that would have gone to other rights holders “but for” the alleged fraud reaches the hundreds of millions of dollars. For many mid-level or legacy artists, even a small percentage loss can mean the difference between surviving off their catalog or falling back into instability.
Community Impact: A Music Ecosystem Undermined
The plaintiff, Eric “RBX” Collins, is a long-standing figure in West Coast hip-hop, with credits on The Chronic, Doggystyle, and other multi-platinum projects. The complaint notes that he holds royalty interests in a catalog of influential tracks and albums and that his music is available on Spotify.
He brings the case “on behalf of other members of the general public similarly situated,” meaning a broad class of rights holders whose income depends on Spotify’s royalty calculations. The alleged harm goes beyond one artist’s bank account. It reaches:
- Established artists who rely on catalog streams for long-term income.
- Independent musicians who already face low per-stream payouts.
- Songwriters and producers whose compensation is tied to the same revenue pool.
The complaint frames RBX’s role as using his voice, once famous on records, now to call out a system that he says has quietly drained value from “more than one hundred thousand rights holders” who are unable or unwilling to challenge a giant in the music industry.
Neoliberal capitalism often treats creative workers as interchangeable. In this telling, Spotify’s alleged failure to safeguard royalties fits a broader pattern where platforms reap the upside of scale while distributing the downside across a vast, fragmented creative class.
The PR Machine and Corporate Spin
Spotify presents itself as a champion of “corporate social responsibility” in music. On its public-facing pages, quoted in the complaint, the company claims that:
- It removes artificial streams daily to keep the playing field level.
- It wants to “give artists the opportunity to live off their art.”
- It is rolling out policy changes to “protect and strengthen” the royalty ecosystem.
The lawsuit describes a gap between these assurances and the reality it alleges: streaming fraud that remains “rampant,” particularly over at least the past four years, and bot-driven plays that continue to shape royalty outcomes.
This is a common corporate pattern. A company markets itself through emotional language about fairness and opportunity while using vague promises and technical jargon to deflect attention from structural failures. In that sense, Spotify’s public narrative, as described in the complaint, looks like a form of corporate spin… language designed to protect brand value even as the underlying system leaves artists exposed.
Legal Minimalism and the Compliance Game
The lawsuit lays out a series of Spotify policy steps: thresholds for streams, undisclosed unique listener minimums, “per-track” charges for flagrant artificial activity. These measures appear, on paper, to address fraud.
The filing suggests that these steps came late and fall short. It highlights that Spotify’s own communications promise effective detection and daily cleaning, yet large-scale fake streaming allegedly continues. The pattern resembles “legal minimalism”:
- The company introduces targeted policy tweaks that demonstrate action.
- It retains discretion over what counts as “flagrant” fraud and how penalties are applied.
- It does not fully disclose thresholds or detection methods, citing a need to deter gaming.
Under neoliberal capitalism, this style of compliance is common. Companies do enough to claim they are responsible while keeping maximum control over the rules and data. Compliance becomes a branding exercise rather than a commitment to protect those who depend on the system.
How Capitalism Rewards Delay and Inaction
The complaint explains that billions of artificial streams allegedly occurred over years and that Spotify “knew or should have known” about this activity based on the data it holds: geolocation patterns, VPN anomalies, impossible travel distances between plays, accounts streaming one artist for 23 hours a day.
At the same time, the lawsuit accuses Spotify of delaying serious anti-fraud measures and implementing them slowly. This timeline reflects a broader truth about late-stage capitalism: delay is profitable. When a company benefits financially from the status quo, slow response is a feature, not a glitch.
Every month that fake streams stay in the system, the revenue pool shifts further toward the beneficiaries of the fraud and the platform continues to enjoy inflated activity metrics. Legal and policy reforms move at the speed of procedural filings and internal reviews, which gives the corporation a long period of gain before any potential reckoning.
Monetizing Harm: Turning Fake Plays into Real Money
The case describes a business model where harm itself generates income:
- Fake streams raise reported total plays and boost MAU-related engagement statistics.
- Higher engagement metrics support higher ad prices and a stronger growth story to investors.
- The cost of this inflation falls on rights holders who see their royalty shares diluted.
In effect, the platform allegedly converts the victimization of artists into revenue. The more the system is gamed in favor of a narrow set of catalogs, the more the platform appears vibrant and massive. Under late-stage capitalism, this kind of extraction is familiar. Financial firms profit from debt spirals; private prisons profit from incarceration; platforms profit from user exploitation and manipulation.
Here, the complaint suggests that Spotify profits from a pool of “engagement” that includes large amounts of fake listening, with little visible urgency to correct the record or restore misallocated royalties.
Profiting from Complexity in Royalty Systems
Spotify’s royalty model is technical and opaque by design. The complaint explains that:
- Royalties come from pooled subscription and advertising money.
- Payouts depend on a share calculation that most artists cannot independently verify.
- Spotify holds the full data on streams, geolocation, and account behavior.
This complexity makes it harder for individual artists to see how much they are losing to fraud. Most rights holders lack direct access to the granular data that would reveal anomalies, like massive volumes of streams from regions with no residential addresses or accounts that “travel” thousands of kilometers between songs.
In many corporate contexts, complex structures and formulas serve as a shield. They diffuse responsibility and make it easy to offload harm onto those with the least power to challenge it. The lawsuit portrays Spotify’s control of streaming data and royalty formulas as part of that dynamic: artists are asked to trust a system they cannot audit.
Corporate Accountability Fails the Public
The complaint asserts claims for negligence and unfair business practices under California law. It argues that Spotify:
- Owed a duty of care to rights holders who depend on its platform for income.
- Failed to monitor and respond to obvious red flags in streaming data.
- Misled rights holders by claiming strong anti-fraud measures while allegedly tolerating continued manipulation.
The lawsuit seeks class certification, damages, restitution, disgorgement of ill-gotten revenues, and court-supervised efforts to identify and compensate those who lost money. It also asks for injunctive relief that would force Spotify to correct its conduct.
At this stage, these are allegations, not court findings. The filing still shows something important: a system where corporate accountability depends on individual artists banding together, hiring lawyers, and challenging a global platform in federal court. When a company that sits at the center of the music economy can allegedly let years of fraud unfold unchecked, the burden of policing the system falls on those with the least leverage.
Pathways for Reform & Artist Power
Based on the issues raised in the complaint, several reforms emerge as plausible responses:
- Independent auditing of streaming data
A neutral body with technical expertise could review streaming patterns, identify bot activity, and recommend restitution. - Transparent royalty reporting
Artists and rights holders could receive standardized reports with enough detail (geographic breakdowns, account clusters, variance from typical decay patterns) to spot anomalies themselves. - Stronger regulatory standards
Public regulators could set baseline rules for digital royalty systems, including minimum anti-fraud controls, disclosure requirements, and penalties for under-protection of rights holders. - Whistleblower protections and incentives
Engineers, data scientists, and insiders who uncover manipulation could receive legal protections and rewards for coming forward. - Collective bargaining and unionization
When artists organize across labels and genres, they can push for contractual terms that require verified stream audits and automatic restitution when fraud is confirmed.
These steps would shift power away from unilateral platform control and toward a more balanced system of corporate accountability and corporate ethics.
This Is the System Working as Intended
The story told in this lawsuit is not some rando glitch in an otherwise fair market. It’s actually a predictable outcome of a system that ranks success by growth charts and shareholder satisfaction.
When a company’s value depends on ever-rising user numbers and stream counts, anything that inflates those metrics becomes tempting. The people whose livelihoods rely on accurate counts (artists, songwriters, producers) live downstream of decisions they do not control.
Neoliberal capitalism promises that markets reward talent and effort. The allegations in this case describe a different reality: a central platform that turns fraudulent activity into revenue and lets a few giant catalogs absorb an outsized share of a finite pool. The problem is not only corporate misconduct; it is the economic logic that makes such misconduct profitable.
💡 Explore Corporate Misconduct by Category
Corporations harm people every day — from wage theft to pollution. Learn more by exploring key areas of injustice.
- 💀 Product Safety Violations — When companies risk lives for profit.
- 🌿 Environmental Violations — Pollution, ecological collapse, and unchecked greed.
- 💼 Labor Exploitation — Wage theft, worker abuse, and unsafe conditions.
- 🛡️ Data Breaches & Privacy Abuses — Misuse and mishandling of personal information.
- 💵 Financial Fraud & Corruption — Lies, scams, and executive impunity.
NOTE:
This website is facing massive amounts of headwind trying to procure the lawsuits relating to corporate misconduct. We are being pimp-slapped by a quadruple whammy:
- The Trump regime's reversal of the laws & regulations meant to protect us is making it so victims are no longer filing lawsuits for shit which was previously illegal.
- Donald Trump's defunding of regulatory agencies led to the frequency of enforcement actions severely decreasing. What's more, the quality of the enforcement actions has also plummeted.
- The GOP's insistence on cutting the healthcare funding for millions of Americans in order to give their billionaire donors additional tax cuts has recently shut the government down. This government shut down has also impacted the aforementioned defunded agencies capabilities to crack down on evil-doers. Donald Trump has since threatened to make these agency shutdowns permanent on account of them being "democrat agencies".
- My access to the LexisNexis legal research platform got revoked. This isn't related to Trump or anything, but it still hurt as I'm being forced to scrounge around public sources to find legal documents now. Sadge.
All four of these factors are severely limiting my ability to access stories of corporate misconduct.
Due to this, I have temporarily decreased the amount of articles published everyday from 5 down to 3, and I will also be publishing articles from previous years as I was fortunate enough to download a butt load of EPA documents back in 2022 and 2023 to make YouTube videos with.... This also means that you'll be seeing many more environmental violation stories going forward :3
Thank you for your attention to this matter,
Aleeia (owner and publisher of www.evilcorporations.com)
Also, can we talk about how ICE has a $170 billion annual budget, while the EPA-- which protects the air we breathe and water we drink-- barely clocks $4 billion? Just something to think about....
