A federal judge has thrown out, for good, the proposed class-action lawsuit that claimed Spotify turned a “blind eye” to billions of fake streams for Drake and other artists.

U.S. District Judge Josephine L. Staton of the Central District of California has dismissed rapper RBX’s amended complaint against Spotify with prejudice, Billboard reported after obtaining the ruling. The order is dated Friday, Oct. 23, and was entered on the court docket Monday, Oct. 26. With prejudice means RBX can’t refile those claims. The court also ordered Spotify to submit a proposed final judgment within five days. Once judgment is entered, RBX’s only road left is an appeal to the Ninth Circuit, and as of this writing, we have found no public statement from RBX or his lawyers on whether they’ll take it.

The judge’s reasoning, as quoted by Billboard, goes straight at the heart of the case: “Other than conclusory statements about Spotify turning a ‘blind eye’ to artificial streaming of tracks from popular artists like Drake, the [lawsuit] contains no other allegations about how Spotify selectively enforces its policies against artificial streaming.”

Staton found RBX had not plausibly alleged any legal wrongdoing by Spotify. She ruled that the streamer owed him no special duty to protect him from bots, writing that “although plaintiff may have less power in the music industry as compared to Spotify, that does not mean his relationship with Spotify is characterized by any protection Spotify gives to plaintiff.” She also rejected his claims under California’s Unfair Competition Law, finding Spotify made no “deceptive misrepresentations” about its anti-bot policies and did not apply them unfairly in ways that hurt RBX, per Billboard. Spotify declined to comment.

A year of “Drake is botted,” and this is how it ended

RBX, whose legal name is Eric Dwayne Collins, filed the suit on Nov. 2, 2025 (C.D. Cal. No. 2:25-cv-10525). Drake was never a defendant and was never accused of wrongdoing, as Music Business Worldwide has noted. He was simply the main exhibit. The complaint claimed that “every month, under Spotify’s watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated,” and alleged that a “substantial, non-trivial percentage” of Drake’s roughly 37 billion Spotify streams between January 2022 and September 2025 were inauthentic.

That was enough for the timeline. The day after the filing, X user Jessahn Amaru posted: “Drake better hope Spotify don’t remove those fake streams 😂.” YouTube commentator J Nolan posted a video titled “Drake Faking BILLIONS of Botted Streams? | RBX vs Spotify Lawsuit.” Behind them came a wave of accounts treating an unproven complaint like a verdict.

Now there is an actual ruling on the complaint, and it says the lawsuit never laid out how Spotify supposedly played favorites.

Staton first dismissed the case on June 22, 2026, calling the allegations too vague and noting that the complaint “focuses almost exclusively on the artificial streams of only one artist’s music,” per Digital Music News. She gave RBX a chance to fix it. His lawyers at Baron & Budd refiled on July 13, raising the stakes with claims that Spotify selectively enforced its anti-fraud policies and that some $600 million in royalties had been diverted from other rights holders. Spotify called the amended complaint “baseless” in a statement to CMU. Two tries later, the court closed the door.

Where this sits in the Drake, UMG and Kendrick saga

The bot question has run in both directions since the 2024 battle with Kendrick Lamar. In November 2024, Drake’s company filed a pre-action petition in New York accusing UMG of using “bots” and pay-to-play deals to push “Not Like Us,” and alleging that Spotify got discounted licensing in exchange for recommending the song. In a December 2024 court filing, Spotify called the premise “false” and said “Spotify and UMG have never had any such arrangement.”

Drake’s federal defamation suit against UMG, filed in January 2025, was dismissed on Oct. 9, 2025, when Judge Jeannette Vargas ruled the lyrics were nonactionable opinion. His appeal, Graham v. UMG Recordings, No. 25-2758, is set for oral argument before the Second Circuit on Dec. 4, per the court’s docket.

Spotify has maintained throughout that it “in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming” and runs “best-in-class systems to combat it,” per Billboard’s June coverage of the first dismissal.

The receipt

For a year, “Drake is botted” got passed around as settled fact. This case put the claim in front of a federal judge, with Drake as its central example, and it ended with the court saying that, beyond “conclusory statements,” the complaint never explained how Spotify selectively enforced its anti-bot rules. The people who swore by it now have a with-prejudice dismissal to argue with. The court didn’t rule on Drake’s streams either way. But in our view, Drake’s numbers stand, and the case built on doubting them doesn’t.