In France, Spotify was convicted of overestimating the number of listeners of artists' tracks

The Spotify music service is accused of supporting fraudulent schemes aimed at overestimating the number of track listenings, as a result of which the earnings of stars increased at the expense of lesser-known artists. This was reported on November 4 by France24.

For example, rapper RBX, Snoop Dogg's cousin, filed a lawsuit in a California federal court, claiming that Canadian rapper Drake earns millions of dollars through a network of bots that create artificial streams to inflate the number of listeners to his tracks. Spotify, in turn, receives significant commercial benefits from creating the appearance of a larger number of users than it actually is.

"Data analysis shows that billions of fraudulent song streams have been created by the 'most listened to artist of all time,' professionally known as Drake. Fraud with Drake's song streams is just one example, this is not an isolated case," the lawsuit says.

Since the music service pays proportional fees depending on the number of auditions, artificially inflating them for some artists reduces the income of other performers. Large-scale fraud causes significant financial damage to performers, songwriters, producers and other legitimate copyright holders, the article clarifies.

A representative of the respondent company denies that Spotify profited from such fraud.

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In February, US President Donald Trump protested that the country was making multimillion-dollar payments to fake centenarians. He noted that according to the official registry, people who are over 130, 140 and 150 years old allegedly live in the country. The registry also includes more than a thousand Americans over the age of 200. In the documentation, the head of state called such facts fraud, left over from the administration of former leader Joe Biden.

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