RBX Gets 21 Days To Refile Lawsuit Against Spotify Over Drake Bot Claims

June 23, 2026

RBX‘s class action lawsuit against Spotify just got knocked out in federal court, and the judge wasn’t convinced by any of it. U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton in California dismissed the case on June 22, tossing both of the Long Beach rapper’s claims against the streaming giant. RBX, born Eric Dwayne Collins, filed the suit […]

RBX‘s class action lawsuit against Spotify just got knocked out in federal court, and the judge wasn’t convinced by any of it.

U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton in California dismissed the case on June 22, tossing both of the Long Beach rapper’s claims against the streaming giant. RBX, born Eric Dwayne Collins, filed the suit in November 2025, arguing that Spotify turned a blind eye to automated bots generating billions of fake streams that funneled royalties away from independent artists toward bigger names. The complaint leaned heavily on Drake as Exhibit A, pointing to what it called an abnormal volume of VPN-masked plays on his catalog between 2022 and 2025.

The judge wasn’t buying it on two separate grounds. First, she found that RBX failed to establish Spotify owed him any legal duty to protect him from third-party bots in the first place. The court ruled that the relationship between Spotify and its rights holders is a commercial one where both sides get economic benefits, and that’s a far cry from the kind of special, protective relationship that creates a negligence duty under California law. Second, his California Unfair Competition Law claim got dismissed too, with the judge ruling his fraud allegations were too vague and that he never showed he actually relied on Spotify’s anti-fraud representations in a way that damaged him.

The Drake angle drew skepticism from Judge Staton directly. She wrote that the complaint “focuses almost exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist’s music,” making it impossible to gauge the actual financial harm to RBX or anyone else in the proposed class. Per Billboard, RBX’s lawyers had argued Spotify’s detection tools were “nothing more than window dressing” and that the platform profited from inflated bot traffic because it padded advertiser-facing metrics. The judge found those claims too speculative to survive.

AllHipHop has been tracking the Spotify streaming fraud case since RBX filed it last year, and according to NBC News, the lawsuit alleged some Spotify accounts were streaming Drake’s music nearly 23 hours a day, with less than 2% of listeners accounting for 15% of his total streams on the platform.

RBX has 21 days from the June 22 ruling to file an amended complaint correcting the deficiencies the court identified.

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