Long Beach-born U.S. rapper RBX (real name Eric Collins) has filed notice of an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit after his lawsuit against Spotify, a DSP (digital service provider), was dismissed. The suit accuses the service of failing to curb bot-driven streaming fraud that harms non-major-label artists.
The appeal#
RBX and his legal team made the notice of appeal public in a brief filing. The main appellate brief has not yet been placed on the docket, so his specific arguments are not yet known.
The amended complaint#
After an earlier dismissal, RBX submitted an amended complaint over the summer. According to the suit, Spotify:
- Is allegedly aggressive in detecting manipulation on independent releases.
- Allegedly fails to crack down on fraud across the catalogs of commercially prominent acts, including Drake.
- Allegedly allowed more than $600 million in royalties to be diverted.
The suit quotes an earlier action, filed at the start of 2026 and since decommissioned, which alleged that Drake, “acting directly and through willing and knowledgeable co-conspirators, has deployed automated bots and streaming farms to artificially inflate play counts of his music across major platforms, such as Spotify.”
Court ruling#
Last month, Judge Josephine Staton dismissed RBX’s suit with prejudice, meaning it cannot be refiled. She found that he “failed to plausibly allege that Spotify has an undisclosed selective [anti-fraud] enforcement policy.”
In her ruling, Staton wrote: “[T]he Court finds Plaintiff’s allegations that Spotify ‘chose to selectively enforce’ its existing artificial streaming infrastructure against certain artists, but not others, to be entirely conclusory and unsupported.”
Wider context#
Plaintiffs bringing similar claims have also struggled to advance their cases. Available evidence suggests that some legitimate artists may be affected by Spotify’s anti-spam crackdown.
Separately, fake plays are reaching the overwhelming majority of generative AI uploads. Deezer is preparing an AI audio on/off toggle, and YouTube Music is now labeling AI outputs.
