A major legal storm just made landfall in the music streaming world. On November 3, 2025, a class-action lawsuit was filed in California federal court by rapper and producer RBX (real name Eric Dwayne Collins) against Spotify. The complaint alleges that the platform turned a blind eye to “mass-scale fraudulent streaming,” allowing certain artists to benefit from billions of fake plays at the expense of thousands of other rights-holders who rely on fair share revenue.

At the centre of the case is one of music’s biggest names: Drake. While not accused of wrongdoing, Drake’s catalogue is singled out in the complaint as a major beneficiary of alleged streaming fraud. According to the lawsuit, during the period from January 2022 to September 2025, a “substantial, non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s reported ~37 billion streams on Spotify were generated by bot networks, VPN-spoofed accounts and geographic anomalies designed to inflate numbers.

The legal argument rests on how Spotify’s royalty model works. Because the company pays artists from a total revenue pool based on their share of streams (commonly called the pro-rata model), any artificial inflation of one artist’s stream count reduces the percentage available to others. The complaint argues that this model allows platform negligence regarding bots to cause “massive financial harm” to legitimate artists, songwriters and producers.

The allegations go into detail. One claim: in a four-day span in 2024, at least 250,000 streams of Drake’s track “No Face” originated from Turkey but were geo-mapped through VPNs to appear as UK-based plays. The lawsuit also notes accounts listening to Drake’s music for 23 hours a day and that less than 2% of users accounted for roughly 15% of his overall streams anomalies that raise red flags according to the filing.

Spotify has responded by denying it benefits from fake streams, stating in media that it “heavily invests in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat [fraud]” and that one identified bad actor was held to about US$60,000 in exposure. The company emphasizes that no wrongdoing has been admitted and that the case remains pending.

The timing of the lawsuit may prove significant for the music industry at large. With streaming now, the dominant revenue source for most artists globally, the legitimacy of plays matters more than ever. For smaller acts in particular, fair share of streaming revenue can mean the difference between sustainable career and marginal existence. The claim that thousands of rights-holders could be affected elevates the matter from one artist’s numbers to industry-wide.

This case also invites questions about the platform responsibility. Should Spotify be held accountable for fraud it can detect or reasonably should detect? What is the threshold for negligence vs operational risk in a global platform with tens of millions of daily users and billions of streams? The lawsuit suggests that platform growth metrics (users, streams, ad impressions) may create incentives to tolerate or overlook fraud.

For artists outside the superstar bracket, the implications are chilling. If stream inflation skews revenue pools at the top, fewer resources trickle down. Opportunities for promotion, playlisting, and marketing may shrink. It also raises reputational risk: legitimate artists may face suspicion over their own numbers, and distribution platforms may tighten algorithms, inadvertently penalizing emerging creators.

South and West Africa’s streaming ecosystems should pay attention too. While this lawsuit is U.S-based, the practice of streaming fraud, bots, playlists farms, geo-spoofing is global. Platforms operating in Nigeria and across Africa are increasingly part of the same digital music economy, and the rules of accountability may ripple across markets. Afrobeats artists, who rely heavily on global streaming for revenue and visibility, may find this case opens new debates about fairness, transparency and platform governance.

The path forward remains uncertain. The plaintiff seeks class certification for rights-holders who collected royalties on Spotify from January 1, 2018, onward. If successful, the case could compel Spotify to provide more transparency around counts, user-account validity, and the mechanisms used to detect fraudulent streams. It might also trigger wider regulatory scrutiny of digital service providers and how they report user and stream data.

In the meantime, the music industry watches. For a decade, streaming has been positioned as the democratic future of music access, equality, global reach. But when that model is challenged by allegations of manipulation, the question emerges: is the stream economy still fair? And if not, who pays for the imbalance?

This new class-action lawsuit against Spotify may not only redefine the economics of streaming, but it could also reshape relationships between artists, platforms and audiences in the 21st-century music business.