[larkinnaire]

If these people create real music, "fake" seems like the wrong adjective. It's very common for musicians to be involved in a bunch of different bands, or even for the same group of people to release music under different band names, for when they want to experiment with stuff that isn't their normal band's "brand". What's being described sounds like SEO optimization to me. A recent Reply All episode interviewed someone who is very successful at Spotify SEO: https://gimletmedia.com/shows/reply-all/j4he7lv

[galaxyLogic]

But what if Spotify pays somebody a salary to create this music, then artificially pushes it up their search-results so people will play it which means they will play less of the music created by independent artists, which means Spotify has to pay fewer royalties to the independent artists.

It would be a bit like if Google-search for some product showed products created by Google on top of the list, but not really even revealing they were products by Google.

I have no information about if this kind of thing is happening but the article suggests there is evidence to suspect it is. Weird artists nobody knows about being on top of the list. How did they get to be top of the list?