What's up with the Spotify business model?

I don't listen to Spotify, but lots of my friends do. I had been spoiled for decades in St. Louis by the community radio station KDHX that broadcast lots of new music in many genres. But now that most of the KDHX DJs I listened to have quit or been fired as the management turned away from the community radio mission, I need a fresh infusion of content. Could Spotify be my answer?

Then I read this:

"In early 2022, I started noticing something strange in Spotify’s jazz playlists.

"I listen to jazz every day, and pay close attention to new releases. But these Spotify playlists were filled with artists I’d never heard of before.

"Who were they? Where did they come from? Did they even exist?"

*snip*

"Many of these artists live in Sweden—where Spotify has its headquarters. According to one source, a huge amount of streaming music originates from just 20 people, who operate under 500 different names.

"Some of them were generating supersized numbers. An obscure Swedish jazz musician got more plays than most of the tracks on Jon Batiste’s We Are—which had just won the Grammy for Album of the Year (not just the best jazz album, but the best album in any genre).

"How was that even possible?

"I continued to make inquiries, and brooded over this strange situation. But something even stranger happened a few months later.

"A listener noticed that he kept hearing the same track over and over on Spotify. But when he checked the name of the song, it was always different. Even worse, these almost identical tracks were attributed to different artists and composers.

"He created a playlist, and soon had 49 different versions of this song under various names. The titles sounded as if they had come out of a random text generator—almost as if the goal was to make them hard to remember.

Trumpet Bumblefig
Bumble Mistywill
Whomping Clover
Qeazpoor
Swiftspark
Vattio Bud

"I reported on this odd situation. Others joined in the hunt, and found more versions of the track under still different names.

"The track itself was boring and non-descript, but it was showing up everywhere on the platform."

OK, looks like Spotify is not for me.

https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-ugly-truth-about-spotify-is-finally?