A federal judge has dismissed RBX’s lawsuit accusing Spotify of allowing Drake and other major artists to benefit from fake streams, marking the latest legal setback in the growing fight over streaming numbers and bot activity in music.
According to Billboard, U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton tossed the case on Monday, June 22, ruling that RBX had not shown enough evidence for the lawsuit to move forward. The judge gave RBX, whose real name is Eric Dwayne Collins, 21 days to file an amended complaint.
RBX, a former Death Row Records artist and cousin of Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, filed the class-action lawsuit in November 2025. The suit accused Spotify of failing to stop mass artificial streaming, which RBX claimed hurt smaller artists by reducing their share of royalty payouts.
“Billions of fraudulent streams have been generated with respect to songs of ‘the most streamed artist of all time,’ Aubrey Drake Graham, professionally known as Drake,” RBX’s lawyers wrote in the complaint.
Drake was not named as a defendant or formally accused of wrongdoing. Instead, the lawsuit used his streaming numbers as an example while accusing Spotify of allowing bots to inflate plays across the platform. RBX’s legal team also claimed Spotify’s anti-fraud policies were “nothing more than window dressing.”
Judge Staton rejected the argument, finding that RBX failed to show Spotify had a legal duty to protect him from bot activity. She also said the complaint did not clearly prove how artificial streaming financially harmed artists like RBX.
“Although plaintiff alleges that Spotify should be doing more, plaintiff does not identify the degree of financial impact artificial streaming has on artists like plaintiff,” Judge Staton wrote. “Plaintiff’s complaint focuses almost exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist’s music, so the extent to which plaintiff is injured by artificial streaming as a whole is unclear.”
The case arrives after streaming bots became a major topic during Drake’s feud with Kendrick Lamar. Drake previously accused Universal Music Group and Spotify of helping inflate Kendrick’s “Not Like Us,” though he later withdrew his Spotify-related petition. His separate defamation lawsuit against UMG over the song was dismissed in October 2025, and he later appealed.
Spotify has denied benefiting from fake streams, saying it “in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming.” The company says confirmed artificial streams do not earn royalties, count toward public stream totals or boost recommendation algorithms.
For now, RBX’s case is not completely over, but the judge’s ruling makes clear that any amended version will need stronger evidence tying Spotify’s alleged bot problem to actual financial harm.
