“Spotify is in no way profiting from the widespread issue of artificial streaming,” stated a representative for Spotify. “We make significant investments in continually enhancing, top-tier systems to address it and protect artist earnings with robust safeguards such as eliminating fake streams, withholding payments, and imposing fines.”
Phony fans seem to travel hundreds of miles between plays
Spotify has openly acknowledged plans to intensify its efforts to identify and impose penalties for streaming fraud. However, RBX claimed that in reality, Spotify “intentionally” “implements inadequate strategies to tackle fraudulent streaming,” resulting in unchecked fraud.
The platform appears least equipped to manage what are termed “Bot Vendors” that “usually create Bots to imitate human actions and mimic legitimate social media or streaming profiles to evade detection,” the lawsuit asserted.
These vendors utilize virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide the sources of streams, but “with sufficient diligence,” RBX argued, Spotify could enhance its detection capabilities—especially when streams originate “from regions that do not have a population large enough to support such high streaming volumes.”
For instance, RBX highlights Drake’s streams once more. Over a span of four days in 2024, “at least 250,000 streams of Drake’s track ‘No Face’ were traced back to Turkey but were inaccurately geomapped through the organized use of VPNs to the United Kingdom,” the lawsuit stated, based on “information and belief.”
Moreover, “a considerable portion of the accounts streaming Drake’s music were geographically clustered in areas whose populations could not sustain the level of streams coming from there. In certain scenarios, huge quantities of music streams, exceeding a hundred million streams, emerged from regions with no residential addresses,” the lawsuit claimed.
Simply examining the movement of Drake’s fans should trigger concern, according to RBX:
“Geohash data indicates that almost 10 percent of Drake’s streams are from users whose location data revealed that they traveled at least 15,000 kilometers within a month, moving between improbable locations between songs (consecutive listens mere seconds apart but spanning thousands of kilometers), including over 500 kilometers between tracks (approximately the distance from New York City to Pittsburgh).”
RBX asserted that Spotify could significantly reduce this activity by stopping its policy of permitting free ad-supported accounts to register without a credit card. However, allegedly it does not, because “Spotify has an incentive to overlook the obvious streaming fraud happening on its platform,” the lawsuit claimed.
