A class-action lawsuit claiming Spotify allows billions of fake bot streams of Drake and other stars has been dismissed again by a federal judge — this time for good.
The case was filed last year by a rapper named RBX (Eric Collins), who accused the music streaming giant of turning a “blind eye” to the problem of streaming fraud by major artists, thus depriving tens of thousands of others of fair royalties.
Though the lawsuit was dismissed earlier this year as too “vague” to move forward, a judge gave RBX a chance to fix his case’s problems. But on Monday (Oct. 26), Judge Josephine Staton rejected the lawsuit with prejudice, meaning the litigation is now permanently over.
“Other than conclusory statements about Spotify turning a ‘blind eye’ to artificial streaming of tracks from popular artists like Drake, the [lawsuit] contains no other allegations about how Spotify selectively enforces its policies against artificial streaming,” Staton wrote in her ruling, obtained and first reported by Billboard.
Streaming fraud — the use of illicit means to inflate song play totals — is a longstanding problem for the music business, made worse by the boom in artificial intelligence. And since royalties on digital services are divvied up among rights holders from a finite pie, such phony numbers siphon off revenue from legitimate streams.
Spotify has said it heavily invests in systems to detect, remove and penalize fake streams, resulting in a “best-in-class system” to fight the problem. The company has previously pointed out that when a North Carolina man was charged in 2024 for stealing $8 million in an AI-powered streaming bot scam, only $60,000 of it allegedly came from Spotify.
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But in November 2025, lawyers for RBX claimed that Spotify’s policies against fake streams were “nothing more than window dressing,” and that the company would prefer to do nothing because bots help the company’s bottom line.
Though Drake was not named as a defendant, the lawsuit took particular aim at him, repeatedly mentioning him as emblematic of the broader problem. “Billions of fraudulent streams have been generated with respect to songs of ‘the most streamed artist of all time,’ Aubrey Drake Graham, professionally known as Drake,” RBX’s lawyers wrote at the time.
But in Monday’s decision, Judge Staton said the rapper had not alleged any plausible legal wrongdoing by Spotify. She rejected his claims that the streamer had been negligent, for instance, by ruling that the company owed him no special duty to protect him from bots.
“Although plaintiff may have less power in the music industry as compared to Spotify, that does not mean his relationship with Spotify is characterized by any protection Spotify gives to plaintiff,” the judge wrote.
The judge also rejected his claims under California’s Unfair Competition Law, ruling that the company had not made any “deceptive misrepresentations” about its anti-bot policies or unfairly applied those policies in ways that hurt RBX.
Spotify declined to comment for this story.
