Spotify User Files Class Action Lawsuit Over Repeat Payments

Top Class Actions’s website and social media posts use affiliate links. If you make a purchase using such links, we may receive a commission, but it will not result in any additional charges to you. Please review our Affiliate Link Disclosure for more information.

Spotify user Melissa Bleak has filed a class action lawsuit against Spotify USA Inc. for allegedly failing to gain proper consent to take repeat payments from her when she signed up for the streaming service’s paid account.

Spotify is a commercial music streaming service that provides content from record labels like Sony, EMI, Warner Music Group and Universal. The company has 6 million subscribers and 24 million active users.

According to the class action lawsuit, Spotify failed to provide in its premium plan notice “a hyperlink to the terms, and the terms are not referenced at all on the unlimited plan notice. Moreover, defendant failed to provide a box to check or any other method by which plaintiff and Class Members could provide their affirmative consent to defendant’s terms.” Because of this, the Spotify class action lawsuit states that the defendant failed to to obtain the plaintiff and Class Members’ affirmative consent to the agreement prior to charging their credit or debit card for automatic renewal or continuous service.

The class action lawsuit states that Spotify has engaged in “unlawful, unfair, and/or fraudulent acts and practices” and has profited “in the amount of those business expenses and interest accrued thereon.”

The Spotify class action lawsuit goes on to contend that Spotify “should be required to disgorge all the profits and gains it has reaped and restore such profits and gains to Plaintiffs and Class Members, from whom they were unlawfully taken” because the company is in violation of the California Business and Professions Code 17602(a)(2).

Cal. Bus. Prof Code 17602(a)(2) states that it is unlawful for any business making automatic renewal or continuous service offer to a consumer in the state of California to “charge the consumer’s credit or debit card or the consumer’s account with a third party for an automatic renewal or continuous service without first obtaining the consumer’s affirmative consent to the agreement containing the automatic renewal offer terms or continuous service offer terms.”

Bleak wants to represent everyone who purchased a Spotify Unlimited Plan or Spotify Premium Plan subscription on their desktop computer in California since Dec. 1, 2010.

Bleak is also seeking class certification and is asking the Court to declare Spotify’s subscription agreement in violation of Cal. Bus. Pro. Code 17602. She also wants the Court to find and declare Spotify in violation of unfair and unlawful business practices and to award full restitution of the subscription payments in an amount to be proved at trial.

The Spotify Subscription Billing Class Action Lawsuit is Melissa Bleak v. Spotify USA Inc., Case No. CGC-13-535309, in the Superior Court of the State of California, County of San Francisco.

UPDATE: A federal judge has granted Spotify’s motion to move the Spotify billing class action lawsuit into arbitration.