Photo Credit: Rubaitul Azad
A federal judge has officially dismissed a class action lawsuit filed against Spotify over its alleged failure to stop “billions of fraudulent streams” from reaching Drake’s music.
Judge Josephine Staton today granted Spotify’s motion to toss the multifaceted complaint, which set sail this past November with rapper (and Snoop Dogg cousin) RBX aboard as the lead plaintiff.
As we reported then, the suit accused the DSP of coming up badly short in its attempts to curb artificial plays. That, in turn, allegedly fueled “fraudulent stream inflation” on the platform’s royalty pool – to the detriment of all the professionals and rightsholders (i.e., the class) without purported armies of bots allegedly boosting their tracks.
Despite the focus on his allegedly inflated streams, Drake wasn’t named as a defendant. Spotify, for its part, denied the claims from the outset and aggressively sought dismissal.
Now, the latter push has delivered the desired result for the platform, as the court has tossed all the claims without prejudice.
On the unfair competition side – “Spotify repeatedly and dishonestly represented that it would detect, prevent, and remedy streaming fraud,” per the original suit – the plaintiff “failed to allege” specifically how Spotify had misled with its fraud-prevention and -detection promises, per the court.
Furthermore, RBX didn’t describe how he’d relied on the alleged misrepresentations when failing to take action against the alleged scheme, the court relayed in different words.
“But such allegations are vague, and fail to identify with particularity how Plaintiff changed his position as a result of Spotify’s purported misrepresentations,” Judge Staton wrote.
Meanwhile, as the “complaint focuses exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist’s music,” the alleged “extent to which Plaintiff is injured by artificial streaming as a whole is unclear,” according to the order.
Finally, the court dismissed the negligence claim due to the plaintiff’s described failure to illustrate a “special relationship” between Spotify and rightsholders or the alleged bots.
With RBX having made his music available via Spotify “for the revenue derived from such music,” the arrangement “is more aptly characterized as a commercial relationship from which both parties derive economic benefits, rather than a relationship where a platform is expected to protect a vulnerable party,” Judge Staton explained.
Regarding what comes next, the lead plaintiff has three weeks to file an amended action if so inclined.
As the dismissal explored the above-noted areas as opposed to the explosive suit’s substance – did Drake actually rack up “more than a hundred million streams” from “areas with zero residential addresses”? – it’ll be worth tracking the case from here.
Moreover, if said case’s details sound familiar, that’s probably because of the similar complaint filed against Drake, online casino Stake, and others.
Admittedly, “similar” is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence; the Stake suit describes a massive alleged racketeering scheme. However, both are class actions, allege “fraudulent streams” on Drake’s music, and have been tossed.
The case against Drake and Stake was dismissed back on June 12th, when the presiding judge granted the plaintiffs the chance “to refile one last amended complaint” by this coming Friday, June 26th.