Judge Tosses RBX Bot-Farming Class Action Against
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- Judge Josephine Stanton dismissed RBX's class action on June 22, ruling he "failed to plausibly allege that the harm he has suffered outweighs any justification Spotify may have for maintaining its current policies regarding artificial streaming."
- Stanton rejected two core claims — that Spotify was negligent in protecting artists and that it violated California's Unfair Competition Law — finding RBX's lawyers hadn't proven Spotify had an obligation to police streaming fraud in the first place.
- The court flagged that the complaint "focuses almost exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist's music," citing Drake's 37 billion total streams and an alleged "non-trivial percentage" driven by bot accounts as the lawsuit's central example.
- Drake was not named as a defendant; the suit argued that fake streams inflated his share of Spotify's royalty pool, diverting an estimated "hundreds of millions of dollars" away from smaller musicians.
- RBX's legal team confirmed to Pitchfork they plan to file an amended complaint within the court's 20-day window, leaving the case alive for now.
- Drake filed his own suit against Spotify and Universal Music Group in 2024 over alleged stream-boosting of Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us" and is separately trying to revive a defamation case against UMG over the diss track.
Why it matters: The ruling hands Spotify a courtroom win in the first major artist-led challenge to streaming manipulation, but RBX's planned amended complaint means the legal fight over algorithmic and bot-driven payouts isn't over. The case also spotlights the structural tension in Spotify's pro-rata royalty model, where one artist's inflated stream count — Drake's 37 billion here — can mathematically shrink every other artist's check.
