Spotify Claims PRO Used Bots To Fake Millions Of Streams
Indie hip-hop label Sosa Entertainment and its founder, 20-year-old Jake Noch, filed a lawsuit against Spotify that alleged the streaming service failed to pay royalties on over 550 million streams of its music.
The suit, which was also brought on behalf of Noch’s PRO Pro Music Rights (which was later removed), sought $150,000 in statutory damages for each infringement, and alleged that Spotify removed its music not because it detected “abnormal streaming activity,” as the service claimed, but because it was trying to dodge paying royalties on the streams.
Now, Spotify has fired back with a countersuit alleging that Noch “designed a scheme to artificially generate hundreds of millions of fraudulent streams” in order to “manipulate Spotify’s system to extract undeserved royalties at the expense of hardworking artists and songwriters.”
