The Legal Beat: RAPPER RBX’S CLASS ACTION AGAINST SPOTIFYIn late 2025, Rapper RBX, whose real name is Eric Dwayne Collins, filed a class action lawsuit in federal court in California against streaming giant Spotify, alleging that Spotify failed to prevent streaming fraud. The action is on behalf of RBX as an individual and “on behalf of other members of the general public similarly situated.”

The lawsuit alleges that Spotify failed to prevent bots (bots are automated software programs that perform repetitive tasks over a network, also commonly known as fake users) from fraudulently inflating the number of streams for Drake, one of the most streamed artists on Spotify, with almost 81 million monthly listeners.

RBX first had success decades ago performing for labels Death Row Records and Aftermath Entertainment alongside Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre. He is Snoop Dogg’s cousin.

Spotify is a massive company with over 713 million users, which includes 281 million paid subscribers; it offers over 100 million songs to these users and leads the audio streaming market.

In particular, the suit alleges that Spotify allowed “billions” of bot-generated streams, which increased Drake’s streams. Drake is not named as a defendant in the lawsuit perhaps because plaintiff had no proof that Drake was involved in any streaming fraud.

RBX contends that some Drake songs have gotten “more than a hundred million streams” which were from “areas with zero residential addresses.” The lawsuit further alleges that Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) were used to disguise some streams and some were apparently created by bots that “moved unreasonable locations between songs.”

The plaintiff claims that Spotify’s failure to keep bots off its platform has caused “massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters and other rightsholders” due to the fact that income earned from streams on Spotify is paid to artists based upon a percentage of the streaming marketplace and that percentage is diluted by the failure of Spotify to keep bots off its platform.

The lawsuit alleges that Spotify’s efforts to eliminate bots are “nothing more than window dressing, inadequate at best.” RBX further contends that the more users Spotify claims it has “the more advertisements it can sell, the more profits the company can report.” 

The suit further states: “[T]his mass-scale fraudulent streaming causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rights holders whose proportional share is decreased as a result of fraudulent stream inflation on Spotify’s platform.”

Spotify claims that it does not benefit from artificial streaming and invests in “always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat it and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing false streams, withholding royalties and charging penalties.”

According to Spotify’s website, it pays artists from a revenue pool and calculates royalty payments from the pool based on an artist’s share of the total amount of monthly streams.

In 2025, shares of Spotify increased to a stock market valuation of a 100 billion dollars. Many artists complain about low streaming income, believing that platforms like Spotify pay too little per play, thus making it hard to earn a living wage for all but very successful artists. The pay per stream rate is only about $0.004 on Spotify.

GLENN LITWAK is a veteran entertainment attorney based in Santa Monica, CA. He has represented platinum selling recording artists, GRAMMY-winning music producers, hit songwriters, management and production companies, music publishers and independent record labels. Litwak is also a frequent speaker at music industry conferences around the country, such as South by Southwest and the Billboard Music in Film and TV Conference. Litwak has been selected as a “Super Lawyer” by Super Lawyer magazine for 2022-2025. Email Litwak at gtllaw59@gmail.com or visit glennlitwak.com.

This article is a very brief overview of the subject matter and does not constitute legal advice.The post The Legal Beat: RAPPER RBX’S CLASS ACTION AGAINST SPOTIFY first appeared on Music Connection Magazine.