A class action lawsuit filed a few weeks ago in California by Snoop Dogg’s cousin, the rapper RBX, claims that Spotify has allowed, for more than three years, a significant volume of flows (i.e. reproductions) not authentic in Drake’s catalog. What exactly does “inauthentic” mean? The document speaks robotautomated accounts and masked traffic via VPN that would have inflated part of the almost 37 billion views accumulated by the artist between 2022 and 2025. An exact figure is not given, but there is talk of “billions”. For example, he mentions that during a four-day period there were flows suspected, precisely 250,000, of the song faceless.
Warning: Drake is not accused of fraud, but he appears as a potential beneficiary of a logic that mixes lax oversight, opaque economic incentives and a system that favors volume over consistency. The lawsuit cites unlikely patterns such as accounts listening nearly 23 hours a day, routes that jump from country to country in minutes, and hundreds of thousands of plays of the same song originating in Turkey but registered as British traffic. That is to say: signals that any human being would recognize as anomalies, but which would coexist without friction within one of the most important catalogs of the platform.
Why is this case important, beyond the morbidity that always surrounds an artist on a global scale? Because in the musical underground these stories have ceased to surprise: hundreds of emerging artists around the world have seen how Spotify withheld payments or reported as suspicious spikes in activity that they did not cause and could not explain. The platform never directly sanctions the musician, as explained in its renewed guide regarding the flows artificial, but at the distributor. This then shifts the punishment to the artist, who is trapped in a trial in which he has no ability to prove his innocence.
One of the recent cases is that of Álvaro Corrochano from Madrid, whose song Sunset experienced a sudden increase in listeners after appearing on a playlist of approximately 70,000 people. The profile seemed legitimate, but the next day the playlist It all disappeared without explanation and the beaking continued, enough of a sign to become suspicious. Corrochano contacted Spotify: first with a botthen with what seemed like someone else bot in the form of a “human worker”. The message was always the same: “Don’t worry, we have automatic systems that detect and eliminate flows artificial.” But the flows they were not cancelled, no one communicated anything to him and the playlist it disappeared from your artist panel as if it never existed.
The ambiguity of cases like this is what fuels the feeling that the system operates with opaque criteria: when the numbers go up, no one explains why; When they collapse, the justifications are automatic and almost always fall on the weakest link. Corrochano doesn’t know if he was the victim of a service robotfrom to playlist irregular or an error in the algorithm itself, but he knows he has no way of knowing. His experience coincides with that of many independent musicians (Reddit is full of testimonials): inexplicable peaks that do not generate real earnings, generic answers that seem to come out of a template, and a fraud detection system that is harshly applied when it harms those who earn little, but which disappears when it is better to interpret the anomalies as simple organic success. That’s why the RBX–Drake–Spotify triangle has sparked so much interest: because it reveals a contradiction that smaller artists have known about for a long time. That the platform acts zealously at the edges of the system, but does not seem capable of exercising the same control at the center, where the numbers (and consequences) become enormous.
The inevitable question is whether the system is designed to detect fraud or manage risk without compromising its most valuable parameters. This is the real background of the lawsuit: instead of pointing out Drake, it questions the mechanisms by which Spotify decides what it considers irregular and what it interprets as simple statistical variation. The platform has built its legitimacy on two indicators, active users and total volume flows monthly, keeping its near-perpetual growth story in front of its investors. Was there intention? The lawsuit does not expressly state this. Spotify did not comment on the dispute but said it “does not benefit in any way from artificial wiretaps, a widespread phenomenon in the sector”. What it suggests is something more systemic: that certain deviations do not generate alarm because, in the general balance of the business, it is more useful to integrate them than to investigate them.
Another irony is that, shortly before this litigation, Drake had sued Universal Music Group alleging that the company had artificially boosted a Kendrick Lamar song to damage his reputation during their public confrontation. That case was dismissed by a federal judge based on the charges against Not like us These were “opinions, unverifiable facts” and therefore could not constitute defamation. This curious coincidence reveals that even the world’s biggest artists have begun to suspect that their careers may be affected (or aided) by data movements they can barely control. When an artist sues his label for “algorithmic manipulation” and weeks later appears surrounded by accusations of false flowsthe focus stops being on the people and shifts towards the architecture that pulls the strings.
Without eating or drinking it, Drake, the most listened to artist on Spotify in the last decade, sees how he can become an inadvertent fact-checker of the popular Dead Internet theory. The conspiracy theory, which emerged around 2016, claims that a growing portion of digital activity is no longer generated by people, but by automation designed to simulate constant participation and alter algorithms, perceptions and search results. It’s not about believing that “human beings no longer exist”, rather it’s about understanding that there are systems capable of “functioning” even when the signals they process don’t belong to anyone. The RBX–Drake–Spotify case suggests that the streaming You can thrive even if a fraction of your traffic is statistically implausible. If impossible stories can normally coexist within the figures of one of the 10 most accomplished artists on the planet, the question is no longer whether they exist robot (of course there are) and it becomes how dependent the industry is on them to maintain its current scale.
Ultimately, this case does not redefine Drake or challenge his position in pop culture. What it reveals is, above all, an infrastructure that converts millions of dispersed stocks into dubious indicators of value. If emerging artists can lose revenue from a few thousand suspicious streams and, at the same time, a much greater volume of anomalies can be integrated without derailing the overall narrative, then the problem lies in the logic that governs said platform. Maybe that’s why this request resonates beyond rap, pop, or the frequent artist-on-artist drama major: because it forces us to face something we feel but cannot easily demonstrate.
