A class-action lawsuit against Spotify over inflated and artificial streaming numbers was dismissed yesterday. The lawsuit was led by California rapper RBX, who accused the platform of allegedly ignoring widespread bot farming. The California judge who dismissed the suit, Josephine Stanton, ruled that RBX had “failed to plausibly allege that the harm he has suffered outweighs any justification Spotify may have for maintaining its current policies regarding artificial streaming,” as reported by Pitchfork.

Two accusations in the lawsuit that Judge Stanton questioned were that Spotify was negligent in its duty to protect its artists and that the streaming giant violated California’s Unfair Competition Law. In countering these points, the judge said that RBX’s lawyers failed to provide sufficient proof that Spotify had an obligation to address streaming fraud at all.

​Another aspect of the lawsuit Judge Stanton took issue with was how much it appeared to focus on a singular artist, Drake. The suit alleged that a significant percentage of the famous rapper’s 37 billion streams were generated by bots. Consequently, due to Spotify’s payout model of allocating royalties based on an artist’s share of the total streaming numbers on the platform, smaller musicians were allegedly getting the short end of the stick, money-wise.

On the repeated mentions of Drake, Judge Stanton wrote, “Plaintiff’s complaint focuses almost exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist’s music, so the extent to which plaintiff is injured by artificial streaming as a whole is unclear.”

One of RBX’s representatives and his legal team told Pitchfork that they would be filing an amended complaint.