According to Pitchfork.com, a new class-action lawsuit against Spotify is taking the fight over alleged streaming fraud to federal court. Backed by data, it allegedly shows that Drake has allegedly benefitted from billions of fake streams and the lawsuit accuses Spotify of allegedly ignoring the alleged exploitation of its payout model, which allocates royalties to artists based on their share of total streaming numbers.

The alleged bot-driven streaming fraud “causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists” and other rights-holders, the lawsuit claims. While Drake’s streaming data is cited as evidence of widespread alleged streaming fraud, he is not accused of wrongdoing. Only Spotify is named as a defendant. Filed in a California federal court on Sunday, November 2, the lawsuit lists rapper RBX as the lead plaintiff, with “other members of the general public similarly situated” given as constituents of the class action. The basis of the action is that artists with accurate streaming data suffer when others have alleged inflated figures because their proportional share of Spotify’s royalty pool shrinks.

The lawsuit claims that a “non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s 37 billion streams allegedly “appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts.” Evidence includes alleged data showing “abnormal VPN usage” in short timespans with high streaming volume, such as a period in 2024 when some 250,000 streams of Drake’s “No Face,” registered in the United Kingdom, were geo-mapped back to Turkey.