Rapper RBX is suing Spotify over “billions of fraudulent streams”

Eric Dwayne Collins, also known as RBX, has filed a lawsuit against Spotify for profiting from “mass-scale fraudulent streaming.”

The plaintiff claims that “billions of fraudulent streams” are generated from fake, illegitimate, and illegal methods every month.

This financially harms legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders, because Spotify only has a limited pool of royalty payments.

How does this work? Simply put, Spotify distributes revenue using a proportional system: every artist receives a portion based on the number of streams per period. Due to fraudulent streams, the proportional share for artists has decreased significantly.

“Spotify publicly claims that it has policies and procedures in place to root out fraud, but its purported system is nothing more than window dressing, inadequate at best,” the plaintiff says in court documents.

As a matter of fact, Spotify is engaged in a “hustle” of its own, RBX claims.

“To satisfy constant pressure from shareholders to grow the business and increase stock prices, Spotify needs an ever-expanding population of users to engage on its platform. Accordingly, Spotify is all too happy to turn a blind eye to the substantial number of fake users on its platform whose activities are controlled by artificial bots to fraudulently inflate streams,” the plaintiff states.

In short, Spotify has deliberately failed to stop botnets since January 2018, which artificially inflated stream counts and resulted in higher advertising revenue. In addition, legitimate artists not only have to compete with other artists for a piece of the pie, but also with creators of AI-generated songs.

According to RBX, this happened to Drake, the most-streamed artist of all time, but this isn't an isolated incident. The plaintiff claims that more than one hundred thousand artists and songwriters are duped by Spotify’s business practices.

By suing the music streaming platform, “plaintiff gives a voice to more than one hundred thousand rightsholders who, among other things, may be unable or too afraid to challenge Spotify, a powerful force in the music business whose failure to act has caused significant problems and great financial harm.”

Before the lawsuit continues, a judge must first determine whether the case may be brought as a class action.

In September, Spotify announced that it had removed over 75 million AI-generated tracks over the past 12 months. At the same time, a spokesperson said that “Spotify does not create or own music, this is a platform for licensed music where royalties are paid based on listener engagement, and all music is treated equally, regardless of the tools used to make it.”