\u201cSpotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming,\u201d Spotify\u2019s spokesperson said. \u201cWe heavily invest in always-improving, best-in-class systems to combat it and safeguard artist payouts with strong protections like removing fake streams, withholding royalties, and charging penalties.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fake fans appear to move hundreds of miles between plays<\/p>\n
Spotify has publicly discussed ramping up efforts to detect and penalize streaming fraud. But RBX alleged that instead, Spotify \u201cdeliberately\u201d \u201cdeploys insufficient measures to address fraudulent streaming,\u201d allowing fraud to run \u201crampant.\u201d<\/p>\n
The platform appears least capable at handling so-called \u201cBot Vendors\u201d that \u201ctypically design Bots to mimic human behavior and resemble real social media or streaming accounts in order to avoid detection,\u201d the lawsuit alleged.<\/p>\n
These vendors rely on virtual private networks (VPNs) to obscure locations of streams, but \u201cwith reasonable diligence,\u201d Spotify could better detect them, RBX alleged\u2014especially when streams are coming \u201cfrom areas that lack the population to support a high volume of streams.\u201d<\/p>\n
For example, RBX again points to Drake\u2019s streams. During a four-day period in 2024, \u201cat least 250,000 streams of Drake\u2019s song \u2018No Face\u2019 originated in Turkey but were falsely geomapped through the coordinated use of VPNs to the United Kingdom,\u201d the lawsuit alleged, based on \u201cinformation and belief.\u201d<\/p>\n
Additionally, \u201ca large percentage of the accounts streaming Drake\u2019s music were geographically concentrated around areas whose populations could not support the volume of streams emanating therefrom. In some cases, massive amounts of music streams, more than a hundred million streams, originated in areas with zero residential addresses,\u201d the lawsuit alleged.<\/p>\n
Just looking at how Drake\u2019s fans move should raise a red flag, RBX alleged:<\/p>\n
\u201cGeohash data shows that nearly 10 percent of Drake\u2019s streams come from users whose location data showed that they traveled a minimum of 15,000 kilometers in a month, moved unreasonable locations between songs (consecutive plays separated by mere seconds but spanning thousands of kilometers), including more than 500 kilometers between songs (roughly the distance from New York City to Pittsburgh).\u201d<\/p>\n
Spotify could cut off a lot of this activity, RBX alleged, by ending its practice of allowing free ad-supported accounts to sign up without a credit card. But supposedly it doesn\u2019t, because \u201cSpotify has an incentive for turning a blind eye to the blatant streaming fraud occurring on its service,\u201d the lawsuit said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cSpotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming,\u201d Spotify\u2019s spokesperson said. \u201cWe heavily invest…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":116897,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-116896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116896"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116896\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/116897"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}