Charlamagne Tha God Thinks Spotify Suit Will Spawn Federal Investigation

Spotify is up against a steep obstacle right as they are currently facing a massive class action lawsuit. Filed at the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California Sunday, folks are accusing the streaming platform of allowing numerous artists, namely Drake, to benefit from illegal plays.

"Every month, under Spotify’s watchful eye, billions of fraudulent streams are generated from fake, illegitimate, and/or illegal methods." The filing is spearheaded by RBX, a California rapper who's cousins with Snoop Dogg. Moreover, the suit argues that this "causes massive financial harm to legitimate artists, songwriters, producers, and other rightsholders."

Additionally, the federal filing describes how Spotify pays the artists their royalties. It's called a "streamshare" model, and it essentially groups all the streams together. Then, they calculate a percentage to determine each artist’s share of those total streams.

In a way, the plaintiffs are pointing out how flawed and unfair this entire business model is, especially for smaller artists. Spotify has since issued a statement on the news. "We cannot comment on pending litigation. However, Spotify in no way benefits from the industry-wide challenge of artificial streaming," a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement. "We 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."

Spotify Class Action Lawsuit

Bots and other illegal streaming practices are nothing new in the music world, but Charlamagne Tha God thinks this will lead to a huge federal investigation. Loren LoRosa and The Breakfast Club crew broke down the basics of the lawsuit. While doing so, they discovered that in regard to Drake and his streaming numbers, Turkey was a location that was generating tons of fake plays.

For example, LoRosa shared that 250,000 were attributed to the song "No Face." TBC, specifically, Charlamagne wondered if this had any connection with the previous issues between Turkey and Spotify from earlier this year.

For those unaware, Turkey’s competition authority went through with a probe in July to examine whether Spotify had violated Turkish law. Per Music Business Worldwide, they wanted to see if the platform was "engaging in practices that complicate the operations of its rivals in the online music streaming services market and/or affect the distribution of the royalties paid to various parties within the framework of its licensing relationships."

Charlamagne predicts that this entire debacle will be "the next federal freak-off." He also foresees there being a lot of artists that are paying these bot farms to boost their numbers.