The Drake case and ‘fraudulent streams’: What the Spotify lawsuit reveals about the music business

A class-action lawsuit filed a few weeks ago in California by Snoop Dogg’s cousin, rapper RBX, claims that Spotify allowed, for more than three years, a significant volume of fraudulent streams across Drake’s catalog. What exactly does “fraudulent” mean? The filing refers to bots, automated accounts, and traffic masked through VPNs that allegedly inflated part of the nearly 37 billion streams the artist accumulated between 2022 and 2025. No exact figure is given, but the document mentions “billions.” As an example, it cites that over a four-day period there were suspicious streams — specifically 250,000 — of the song No Face.

To be clear, Drake is not accused of fraud, but he does appear as a potential beneficiary of a system combining lax oversight, opaque financial incentives, and a setup that prioritizes volume over consistency. The lawsuit mentions patterns as improbable as accounts listening almost 23 hours a day, routes jumping between countries in a matter of minutes, and hundreds of thousands of plays of the same track originating in Turkey but recorded as U.K. traffic. In other words: signals that any human would recognize as anomalies, yet which appear to seamlessly exist on one of the platform’s most important catalogs.

Why does this case matter, beyond the curiosity that always surrounds a global superstar? Because within the music industry, these stories are not longer a surprise: hundreds of emerging artists worldwide have seen Spotify withhold payments or flag spikes in activity they didn’t cause and couldn’t explain. The platform never directly penalizes the musician, as made clear in its updated guide on artificial streams, but instead targets the distributor. The distributor then passes the penalty on to the artist, who is left trapped in a process with no way to prove their innocence.

One recent case involves Álvaro Corrochano, from Madrid, whose song Ocaso experienced a sudden spike in plays after appearing on a playlist with about 70,000 followers. The profile seemed legitimate, but the next day the entire playlist disappeared without explanation, and the spike continued — enough for him to start suspecting something was wrong. Corrochano contacted Spotify: first a bot, then what appeared to be another bot disguised as a “human employee.” The response was always the same: “Don’t worry, we have automated systems that detect and remove artificial streams.” But the streams were never removed, he received no notification, and the playlist vanished from his artist panel as if it had never existed.

The ambiguity of cases like this fuels the sense that the system operates under opaque criteria: when numbers rise, no one explains why; when they fall, the justifications are automatic and almost always fall on the weakest link. Corrochano doesn’t know if he was the victim of a bot service, an irregular playlist, or an error in the algorithm itself, but he does know he has no way of finding out. His experience mirrors that of many independent musicians (Reddit is full of stories): unexplained spikes that generate no real income, generic responses that seem copy-pasted, and a fraud-detection system applied harshly when it harms those earning little but ignored when anomalies can be interpreted as simple organic success.

That’s why the RBX–Drake–Spotify triangle has attracted so much attention: because it exposes a contradiction that smaller artists have known for a long time. The platform enforces rules strictly at the margins of the system, yet seems unable to exercise the same control at the center, where the numbers — and the consequences — become enormous.

The inevitable question is whether the system is designed to detect fraud or to manage risk without compromising its most valuable metrics. That is the real backdrop of the lawsuit: more than targeting Drake, it questions the mechanisms Spotify uses to decide what it considers irregular and what it interprets as mere statistical variation. The platform has built its legitimacy on two indicators — active users and total monthly streams — supporting its narrative of almost perpetual growth to investors. Was there intent? The lawsuit does not specifically claim so. Spotify has not commented on the case but has stated that it “in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming.” What this suggests is something more systemic: that certain deviations do not trigger alarms because, in the overall balance of the business, it is more useful to integrate them than to investigate them.

Another irony is that, just before the lawsuit, Drake had sued Universal Music Group, claiming that the company had artificially promoted a Kendrick Lamar track to damage his reputation during their public feud. That case was dismissed by a federal judge, who argued that the allegations in Lamar’s track Not Like Us were “nonactionable opinion” and therefore could not constitute defamation. This curious coincidence shows that even the world’s biggest artists have begun to suspect that their careers can be affected — or even boosted — by data movements they barely control. When an artist sues their own label for “algorithmic manipulation,” and weeks later is surrounded by accusations of fake streams, the focus shifts from individuals to the architecture pulling the strings.

Through no fault of his own, Drake — the most-streamed artist on Spotify in the past decade — may find himself an unwitting case study for the popular “dead internet theory.” This conspiracy theory, which emerged around 2016, claims that an increasing portion of digital activity is no longer generated by humans, but by automated systems designed to simulate constant engagement and manipulate algorithms, perceptions, and search results.

It’s not about believing that “humans are gone,” but rather sensing that there are systems capable of “functioning” even when the signals they process don’t belong to anyone. The RBX–Drake–Spotify case suggests that streaming can thrive even if a fraction of its traffic is statistically improbable. If impossible accounts can coexist normally within the numbers of one of the 10 most-consumed artists on the planet, the question is no longer whether bots exist (they clearly do), but how much the industry depends on them to maintain its current scale.

Ultimately, this case does not redefine Drake or question his position in pop culture. What it exposes is, above all, an infrastructure that turns millions of scattered actions into dubious indicators of value. If emerging artists can lose revenue over a few thousand suspicious plays, while a much larger volume of anomalies is integrated without altering the overall narrative, then the problem lies in the logic governing the platform itself. Perhaps that is why this lawsuit is reverberating beyond rap, pop, or the frequent dramas between artists and major labels: because it forces us to confront something we sense but cannot easily prove.

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