Drake finds himself at the centre of Spotify’s latest streaming scandal
The latest class-action lawsuit against Spotify has the internet’s most-streamed artist — Drake — caught right in the middle of it. Filed in a California District Court on Sunday night by Snoop Dogg’s cousin, RBX, the suit accuses Spotify of “turning a blind eye” to large-scale streaming fraud. It claims the platform’s payout system — which distributes royalties based on an artist’s share of total streams — has been exploited through bot-driven manipulation, allegedly causing “massive financial harm to legitimate artists” and rights-holders.
At the centre of it all is Drake’s streaming data. According to Pitchfork, the lawsuit cites “abnormal VPN usage” and unusually high streaming spikes — like a 2024 window where 250,000 plays of Drake’s ‘No Face’, logged in the UK, were actually traced back to Turkey. While Rolling Stone reports that Drake’s representative declined to immediately comment on the allegation that his 37 billion streams were bot-driven, the rapper himself hasn’t been named as a defendant in the case — only Spotify has.
The lawsuit also questions irregularities in how individual accounts streamed Drake’s music.“Drake’s music accumulated far higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had far more ‘users’ than Drake,” Rolling Stone cites from the filing.
It also claims that the cost of “the fraudulent boosting of Drake’s music is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars”, Pitchfork notes. Meanwhile, Spotify, the suit argues, has “deliberately turned a blind eye to fraudulent streaming” — because the platform benefits from it too.
A Spotify spokesperson said the company could not comment on pending litigation, but added, “We heavily invest in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat [artificial streaming] and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and charging penalties.”
