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As of early November 2025, the music industry is again wrestling with streaming-fraud allegations, and one of its biggest names—Drake—is cited at the center of a new class-action lawsuit against Spotify. While no wrongdoing by the artist has been legally established, the case raises important questions about how fraudulent streams can affect payouts to legitimate creators. Below is a breakdown of the situation, its sources, and how this matters for your royalties.
On November 2 2025, a class-action complaint was filed against Spotify in California, led by rapper RBX (legal name Eric Dwayne Collins). The suit claims Spotify has “turned a blind eye” to large-scale fraudulent streaming, and it specifically cites Drake as a beneficiary of “billions” of illegitimate plays.
Key points from the complaint include:
The claim that a “non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s 37 billion+ streams on Spotify may have originated from bot accounts or otherwise manipulated usage data.
Allegations of abnormal VPN usage, streaming activity in regions whose populations cannot support the volume of plays cited (for example, a cited four-day period in 2024 where over 250,000 streams of Drake’s song “No Face” purportedly originated in Turkey but were geo-mapped via UK VPNs).
The argument that because Spotify pays royalties on a shared-pool model (artists receive a share of the total stream volume), artificially inflated streams reduce allocations to artists with legitimate traffic.
Spotify, for its part, states that it “heavily invests in … systems to combat artificial streaming,” and denies that it benefits from fraudulent activity.
Importantly: Drake himself is not named as a defendant in the suit, and the allegations stop short of asserting his personal involvement.
In November 2024, Drake (via his company Frozen Moments LLC) filed legal action against Universal Music Group (UMG) and Spotify, alleging that UMG engaged in artificial streaming and pay-to-play tactics to inflate the performance of Kendrick Lamar’s diss track “Not Like Us.” The filing claimed bot-driven plays, Siri mis-directs, and other schemes.
That case was withdrawn in January 2025 without a financial settlement.
The connection between these two situations underscores how streaming fraud allegations are crossing paths with major artists and high-profile catalog holders—even when direct liability isn’t proven.
Even if an individual artist is not proven culpable, streaming manipulation affects the ecosystem in ways that matter to you:
Dilution of Shared Royalty Pools: Since services like Spotify allocate royalties based on an artist’s share of total streams, inflated play counts belonging to one artist reduce the share available to all others who streamed legitimately.
Detection & Removal Risk: When platforms detect suspicious patterns (bots, VPN masking, click farms), they may remove or withhold streams. That can reduce reported plays and thus royalty payouts for legitimate rights-holders.
Transparency & Auditing Gaps: Many artists lack visibility into how their streams are counted, how discovery mechanisms work, or how payouts are calculated. These lawsuits highlight the need for monitoring.
Reputational Risk and Contract Leakage: Artists or their labels may be more carefully scrutinized. Some catalog deals or distributor agreements may introduce clauses tied to “clean” stream data.
These issues underscore the importance of accurate registration, metadata, and audit-ready royalty statements.
Here are proactive steps to guard your streaming-based income:
Register thoroughly: Ensure your works are registered with your PRO (e.g. ASCAP, BMI) and mechanical rights body (e.g. The MLC), and your catalog data is correct.
Monitor your streaming analytics: Track patterns of unusual geographic surges, suspicious playlist placements, or un-explained spikes.
Audit your royalty statements: Engage a royalty-audit specialist to review your reports and holds, particularly if payouts seem suppressed or inexplicable.
Stay updated on anti-fraud industry initiatives: Organisations such as Music Fights Fraud Alliance (MFFA) work to detect and prevent artificial streaming.
The latest streaming-fraud allegations touch one of the highest-profile canaries in the coal-mine: Drake. Whether the claims ultimately prove valid or not, the implications are clear: legitimate streams and artists’ earnings depend on the integrity of platform data.
For independent creators, the message is straightforward: get your data right, watch your streams, and make sure your royalty pipeline is transparent. Because when fraud enters the stream-share model, it isn’t just numbers that get distorted — it’s do-able income.
Royalties & Bundles: How “All-in-One” Plans Cut Payouts — and When Clarity Might Arrive When a streaming service adds audiobooks (or other media) to a music plan and calls it a bundle, U.S. mechanical royalties for songwriters can be calculated at a discounted...