LOS ANGELES – The music-streaming service Spotify allows bots to inflate the number of plays for some artists, which limits the amount of money available for others, the rapper RBX says in a federal lawsuit.
Eric Dwayne Collins, who performed under the name RBX for Death Row Records in the 1990s, hopes to lead a class of artists seeking what they say is their fair share funds generated by Spotify’s membership fees. He filed suit Nov. 2 in Los Angeles federal court through the noted plaintiffs law firm Baron & Budd.
More streams give artists more royalty payments and place them in prominent spots on the app.
“In the face of this competition, some take the Hustle too far – they resort to cheating,” the lawsuit says.
“Every month, under Spotify’s watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake, illegitimate and/or illegal methods (e.g., bots).”
A Spotify spokesperson said the company doesn’t comment on pending litigation but remarked the company does not benefit from the “industry-wide challenge” of artificial streaming.
“We heavily invest in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat it and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and charging penalties,” the spokesperson said.
“Our systems are working: In a case from last year, one bad actor was indicted for stealing $10,000,000 from streaming services, only $60,000 of which came from Spotify, proving how effective we are at limiting the impact of artificial streaming on our platform.”
The lawsuit says Spotify’s most-streamed artist – Drake – had more than three years of abnormal streaming activity. A VPN was used to trace 250,000 streams of one song to the United Kingdom when they actually originated in Turkey, it says.
“In some cases, massive amounts of music streams, more than a hundred million streams, originated in areas with zero residential addresses,” RBX says.
Some accounts listened exclusively to Drake for 23 hours a day, the suit says, and that 2% of his listeners account for 15% of his stream, the suit says.
This is Spotify’s fault, RBX, because it knew or should have known about these anomalies. The company should have used reasonable detection measures and spotted these “statistically improbable” geohashing, surges, and coordinated patterns.
And had Spotify done so, artists whose streams are not being manipulated would have made more money from the Spotify pool, the suit says.
“Spotify has an incentive for turning a blind eye to the blatant streaming fraud occurring on its service,” the suit says.
“Spotify derived revenue, in part, from advertising. The higher the volume of individual streams, the more Spotify could charge for ads.”
This is “active concealment” that should allow claims for damages outside of the statute of limitations, the suit says. It seeks the formation of a nationwide class of artists and a subclass of Californians while making claims for negligence and violation of the California Unfair Competition Law.
