I highly doubt that Spotify would make this up.
According to Spotify’s counterclaim, filed Monday (May 18), the service first detected artificial streaming activity on Noch’s content in March 2016 and eventually banned his music from the service, before extending that ban to all content related to Noch. Noch then tried to "smuggle" the content back onto the service using slightly different names and created millions of fake accounts to stream that music.
In June 2016, a whistleblower contacted Spotify with screenshots that purported to show Noch directing the person to create millions (direct quote: "i need millions") of fake accounts. And while Spotify had identified the fraud a few months prior, the company had already paid a small amount of royalties to Sosa and Noch -- royalties that otherwise would have gone to legitimate songwriters with songs being streamed by legitimate fans. According to the complaint, for one of Noch’s albums that jumped from zero streams to more than 400,000 in just days, 99% of its streams came from Spotify’s ad-supported free tier and from accounts registered to male users in the United States, a pattern that was also found for other works.
Noch then changed distributors and changed the names of some of his companies in order to dodge Spotify’s fraud detection systems, with slightly different artist names, song titles and cover artwork. In one section of the complaint, attorneys wrote that "analysts at Spotify found that 5,500 'users' streaming one of the Sosa albums 'originated' from a small American town with a total population of 10,000. For that album, the stream count jumped from zero to 749,000 streams in a span of only two days... This pattern is highly anomalous and not at all correlated to any possible pattern of genuine streaming activity."
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In another example from the complaint, in what the filing calls "title track parasitism," Noch and Sosa uploaded tracks called "SAD!" with the same punctuation as the XXXTentacion hit, and "Taki Take," shortly after the similarly-named DJ Snake song reached the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100. Some of the tracks that Noch and Sosa would release on Spotify were AI-generated sound loops.
In all, Spotify’s counterclaim seeks relief for fraud, fraudulent concealment, breach of contract, indemnification, unjust enrichment and deceptive business practices. As another line in the complaint reads, "This was one of the most egregious fraudulent streaming operations from a single rights holder that Spotify had to deal with in its company’s history."
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