A new class action lawsuit accuses Spotify of allow billions of fraudulent bot-generated Drake streams between 2022 and 2025allegedly inflating his royalties at the expense of other artists. “Spotify pays streaming royalties using a ‘pro-rata’ model based on the artist’s market share,” Consequence notes. “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 artificially inflating their numbers through bots would dilute the value of each legitimate stream. This allows them to take a larger portion of the pot than they earned, effectively diverting royalties that should have gone to other artists.” From the report: According rolling stoneThe lawsuit alleges that the use of bots is a widespread problem at Spotify. However, Drake is the only example mentioned, based on “voluminous information” that the company “knows or should know” that demonstrates that a “substantial and non-trivial percentage” of its approximately 37 billion streams were “inauthentic and appeared to be the work of an expanding network of bot accounts.”
The complaint claims that this alleged fraudulent activity took place between “January 2022 and September 2025,” and an examination of “abnormal VPN use” revealed that at least 250,000 streams of Drake’s song “No Face” over a four-day period in 2024 were actually from Turkey “but were falsely geo-mapped through the coordinated use of VPNs in the United Kingdom in [an] attempt to conceal its 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 lawsuit also notes “significant and irregular months of increases” for Drake’s songs long after their release, as well as a “slower and less dramatic” decline in streams compared to other artists.
Noting a “staggering and irregular” stream of Drake’s music by individuals, the lawsuit also claims that there are a “vast number of accounts” that listen to his songs “23 hours a day.” Less than 2% of those users account for “about 15 percent” of their streams. “Drake’s music racked up much higher total streams compared to other highly streamed artists, even though those artists had many more ‘users’ than Drake,” the lawsuit concludes.
