Spotify has responded after West Coast Hip-Hop veteran RBX accused the platform of enabling billions of synthetic Drake streams in a class-action lawsuit that claims smaller artists misplaced tons of of thousands and thousands of {dollars} resulting from manipulated numbers.

RBX filed the 28-page complaint in Los Angeles federal court docket on November 2, alleging that Spotify knowingly allowed fraudulent streaming exercise to inflate the numbers of famous person artists, together with Drake, whereas harming unbiased musicians.

The go well with claims that “a substantial, non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s streams have been pretend, together with greater than 250,000 performs of 1 monitor traced to Turkey and rerouted by means of VPNs within the United Kingdom.

Spotify responded on Monday (November 3) with an announcement denying any profit from synthetic streaming.

“We cannot comment on pending litigation. However, Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming,” an organization spokesperson mentioned. “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 lawsuit doesn’t identify Drake, Universal music Group or any third-party advertising companies as defendants. Instead, it focuses solely on Spotify’s alleged position in facilitating a system that inflates stream counts to draw advertisers and increase platform engagement.

According to the submitting, some Spotify accounts streamed Drake’s music almost “23 hours a day,” with lower than 2% of listeners accounting for 15% of his whole streams.

The go well with claims these patterns level to bot exercise, which RBX argues distorts the royalty pool and results in unfair payouts.

Spotify defended its anti-fraud efforts by citing a 2022 case involving producer Michael Smith, who was indicted for stealing $10 million from numerous streaming platforms.

“Our systems are working,” the corporate mentioned. “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.”

RBX, identified for his early work with Death Row Records and collaborations with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, filed the lawsuit on behalf of all artists who might have been shortchanged resulting from alleged streaming manipulation.

Spotify has not but filed a proper authorized response, however its assertion alerts a transparent intent to contest the claims in court docket.

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