A dismissal “with prejudice” is the hardest loss a civil plaintiff can take at trial level: the court is not just closing this case, it is ruling that no amount of amendment could fix it. That is what U.S. District Judge Josephine Staton did to rapper RBX’s streaming fraud suit against Spotify on October 23, and it is why his November 6 notice of appeal to the Ninth Circuit has to clear a specific, narrow bar rather than simply ask for a second look. The same week, Penske Media filed its own appeal against a dismissed antitrust case against Google, an unrelated dispute that happens to be testing the identical procedural move at the identical moment. Neither appeal has produced a merits brief yet. What already exists, in Staton’s order, is a precise map of what it takes to make a fraud claim against a streaming platform survive, and what RBX’s case (Collins v. Spotify USA, No. 2:25-cv-10525, C.D. Cal.) did not show.
What “dismissed with prejudice” forecloses#
RBX, legal name Eric Collins, first sued Spotify in November 2025 over what the suit called bot-driven streaming fraud. Staton dismissed that version on June 22, 2026, but with leave to amend, the ordinary outcome when a complaint is thin rather than legally dead. Collins filed an amended complaint on July 13, recasting the claim as platform-wide harm to independent rights holders rather than a dispute centered on one artist. Staton dismissed that version too, on October 23, and this time with prejudice: not “try again,” but “there is nothing here a better-written complaint could fix.” A dismissal without prejudice sends a plaintiff back to the drafting table. A dismissal with prejudice sends them to the court of appeals, where the question is no longer whether the plaintiff told a persuasive story but whether the trial judge got the law wrong.
Four theories, four specific failures#
The amended complaint alleged that Spotify polices suspected bot streams aggressively on independent releases while tolerating them on commercially dominant catalogues, Drake’s among them, and that this selective enforcement diverted at least $600 million in royalties industry-wide. Drake was never named as a defendant and the court did not rule on whether the streaming figures in the complaint were accurate. The dismissal turned entirely on whether the legal theories held up even if every factual allegation were true. They did not, for four separate reasons:
- No duty of care. Staton found Spotify owes no general legal duty to shield an artist from third-party bot fraud. Her order noted that, as pleaded, “Plaintiff is not a small or vulnerable artist,” the category where such a duty is more plausible.
- No voluntary undertaking. Collins argued Spotify’s public anti-fraud pledges created an obligation it then failed to meet. That theory requires an allegation of physical harm, which a royalty dispute cannot supply.
- No actionable misstatement. Spotify’s language about a “level playing field” was ruled aspirational, not a checkable fact. The claim that Spotify removes artificial streams daily was not shown to be false; the complaint only showed that bot streaming still exists somewhere on the platform, which is not the same thing.
- No selective enforcement, as pleaded. This is the one worth sitting with. Staton wrote that the complaint described “not a theory of selective enforcement, but of disparate impact,” and called the claim “entirely conclusory and unsupported.” The distinction matters: disparate impact means a neutral rule happens to land harder on some artists than others. Selective enforcement means Spotify applied its own stated rules unevenly on purpose. Collins needed the second and only showed something closer to the first.
A fifth claim, that Spotify’s conduct violated California’s Unfair Competition Law, failed on standing grounds: the statute protects consumers and competitors, and Collins sued as a rights holder, a category the law does not cover.
The number the ruling treats as lawful, that still matters to African catalogues#
Buried inside the complaint, and not disputed by the court, is an operative fact about how Spotify pays at all: since April 2024, a track must reach 1,000 streams in a rolling twelve-month window, plus an undisclosed number of unique listeners, before it generates recorded royalties. Staton’s ruling treats this threshold as lawful specifically because it is publicly disclosed, not hidden, which is also why it could not support a fraud claim. That reasoning does not make the threshold any less consequential for catalogues with slow-building, geographically dispersed listenership, the pattern typical of diaspora-driven African streaming. A track stuck below the line earns nothing no matter how authentic every stream is. Afrobeats Wire has previously reported on how fraud elsewhere in the pool compounds that exact problem for African rights holders, since every fraudulent stream anywhere in a shared royalty pool dilutes the per-stream rate available to everyone below the eligibility line.
What the Ninth Circuit will actually look at#
An appeal of a dismissal under Rule 12(b)(6) is reviewed de novo, meaning the appellate panel owes no deference to Staton’s legal conclusions and can, in theory, start from zero. In practice, that is a narrower door than it sounds. The panel reviews only whether the law was applied correctly to the facts as already pleaded; it does not take new evidence, hear new witnesses, or let Collins add facts his lawyers left out the first time. Staton additionally found that amendment would be “futile,” a finding the Ninth Circuit would have to disturb for the case to go anywhere beyond affirming the dismissal. As of this piece’s publication, Collins’s full appellate brief had not yet reached the docket, so the specific legal argument he intends to make has not been made public. His attorney, Mark Pifko, had signalled an appeal was likely before the notice was filed.
What this means for artists#
Three practical points follow directly from the order, independent of how the appeal turns out:
- Unequal outcomes are not the same as proven fraud. A court will not infer that a platform is cheating smaller artists just because big catalogues seem to get more benefit of the doubt. A claim needs a specific, named enforcement decision applied unevenly, not a pattern inferred from outcomes.
- Published thresholds are not hidden tricks, legally speaking. Spotify’s streams-and-listeners minimum for royalty eligibility is disclosed policy. Any rights holder trying to build a legal claim around it would need to show Spotify applied it inconsistently, not merely that it exists and hurts small catalogues.
- A dismissal with prejudice closes the trial court door permanently. Once a claim is dismissed with prejudice, there is no second complaint. Collins’s only remaining option was always the appeal he has now filed, which argues the judge erred on the law, not a retrial on the facts.
The case moves forward once Collins’s opening appellate brief is filed with the Ninth Circuit. Until then, the specific legal error he is asking the panel to find remains undisclosed.
