This latest legal post doesn't involve Drake suing or being sued, yet somehow it's still all about him.
The namesake of October's Very Own spent his birthday month taking courtroom Ls. First, he watched his lawsuit against Universal Music Group regarding their promotion of Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" get dismissed. Then, last week, Drake and his livestream buddy Adin Ross were named in a lawsuit against the online casino Stake. Now there's a new class action lawsuit claiming Aubrey Graham's streaming numbers are artificially inflated.
A new class action suit against Spotify, filed Sunday night in California District Court, claims the streaming platform has "turned a blind eye" to "mass-scale fraudulent streaming," Rolling Stone reports. Filed with Snoop Dogg's cousin RBX as the lead plaintiff, the suit alleges that "a substantial, non-trivial percentage" of Drake’s approximately 37 billion streams were "inauthentic and appeared to be the work of a sprawling network of Bot Accounts." Drake is the only alleged beneficiary of fake streams to be specifically mentioned in the suit, but he himself is not being sued. Instead, the complaint's one defendant is Spotify, which, if counting streams it knows to be inauthentic, would be serving a larger percentage of its royalty payouts, at the expense of other artists.
"Every month, under Spotify’s watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake, illegitimate, and/or illegal methods," the lawsuit states — fraud that "causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders." Elsewhere, the lawsuit claims, "For Spotify, more users and music streams means more advertising dollars, so long as the true origin of the streams remains hidden," though more streams also means the company has more royalty payouts to account for. The suit is based on an examination of Drake's streams between January 2022 and September 2025, which allegedly revealed "abnormal VPN usage," such as 250,000 streams of Drake's "No Face" last year that originated in Turkey and were redirected through the United Kingdom to obscure their point of origin.
In response, Spotify offered this statement to Rolling Stone:
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. 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.
The spokesperson also highlighted Spotify's info page about artificial streaming.
