Key Takeaways
- Legal Issues: Drake is implicated in a class action lawsuit against Spotify regarding fraudulent streaming practices.
- Allegations: The lawsuit claims that a significant portion of Drake’s Spotify streams may be generated by bots.
- Impact on Artists: The suit argues that such fraudulent activities harm legitimate artists and rightsholders financially.
- Spotify’s Response: Spotify denies the allegations and emphasizes its efforts to combat artificial streaming.
Drake‘s legal woes have taken yet another twist as the 6 God has been named in a new class action lawsuit accusing Spotify of “turning a blind-eye” to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming.”
The lawsuit, filed by rapper RBX — a cousin of Snoop Dogg who is best known for his collaborations with Dr. Dre and Eminem — cites Drake as the main beneficiary of this alleged misconduct, claiming a “substantial” amount of his record 122 billion Spotify streams have come through illegal methods such as bots.
Such mass scale streaming fraud “causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders,” argues the suit, which was obtained by Rolling Stone.
Though Drake is named in the lawsuit, he is not listed as a defendant. Only Spotify is accused of wrongdoing.
In the complaint, RBX points to “voluminous information” which he says proves that a significant percentage of Drizzy’s streams were “inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts.”
Between January 2022 and September 2025, the suit claims, an examination of the Canadian hitmaker’s streams revealed “abnormal VPN usage” had obscured the location of these bot accounts.
RBX alleges that over a four-day period in 2024, over 250,000 streams of Drake’s song “No Face” originated in Turkey “but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom in [an] attempt to obscure their origins.”
The “Remember Me?” rapper even claims that “a large percentage” of accounts streamed Drake’s music from “areas whose population could not support” such a large volume of streams, and that some streams originated in areas with “zero residential addresses.”
A spokesperson for Spotify refuted the allegations, saying in a statement: “We cannot comment on pending litigation. However, Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming.
“We heavily invest in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat it and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and charging penalties.”
The statement continued: “Our systems are working: In a case from last year, one bad actor was indicted for stealing $10 million from streaming services, only $60,000 of which came from Spotify, proving how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform.”
Drake himself has yet to comment on the lawsuit.
The bombshell suit comes shortly after the OVO Sound boss saw his own lawsuit against Universal Music Group, which contained similar allegations of streaming fraud, get dismissed.
A federal New York judge tossed out the high-profile complaint after ruling that Kendrick Lamar’s hit diss song “Not Like Us” did not defame Drake.
The Toronto native has since filed a notice of appeal, signalling his intent to dispute the decision.
