Rapper sues Spotify over bot streams

A US rapper has filed a lawsuit against Spotify in California. He accuses the Swedish streaming service of tolerating fake streams by bots to embellish key figures for investors. This strongly disadvantages smaller artists, argue the lawyers of the rapper, whose real name is Eric Dwayne Collins. The lawsuit is filed as a class action lawsuit; should the judges agree, thousands of other artists could join.

Specifically, the lawsuit, which Ars Technica published, is directed against bot streams of music by the Canadian rapper Drake. According to the lawsuit, he is the most streamed Spotify artist of all time and reached 120 billion stream requests in September. How RBX's lawyers arrive at these and other analyses in their lawsuit is unclear—these figures are not publicly available.

23 hours a day, Drake

A significant portion of the stream requests for Drake's music is attributable to large bot networks, RBX argues. Over the years, Drake's album streams have repeatedly shot up, which RBX considers very untypical behavior. Some accounts have listened exclusively to Drake's music for 23 hours a day in recent years. This is a clear indication that these are bots, the lawsuit states.

Spotify should also have recognized these patterns but remained deliberately inactive. Because of economic pressure, the Swedish streaming service tolerates bot accounts to present higher user numbers to its investors, write RBX's lawyers.

Criticism of Spotify's payment system

The payment model of Spotify is not being criticized for the first time. Spotify has a fixed pool of money that is distributed among artists each year. Those who are streamed more receive more money. This leads to major artists pocketing the lion's share of the pot, while small artists often have to make do with less income. And if bots artificially inflate the play counts of well-known musicians with fake streams, less remains for everyone else.

A study commissioned by the red-green federal government also criticized the payment model of Spotify and other streaming platforms: “When 75 percent of revenues go to 0.1 percent of artists, that speaks volumes,” commented then-Minister of State for Culture Claudia Roth on the study's findings. “Fair remuneration for music creators, more transparency, and thus an overall democratization of market power are needed.”

In a statement to the music magazine Rolling Stone, Spotify denies the allegations from the RBX lawsuit: “Spotify does not benefit in any way from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming,” said a Spotify spokesperson. “We invest heavily in continuously improving, best-in-class systems to combat this problem and secure payouts to artists with effective safeguards, such as removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and imposing penalties.”

(dahe)