This was brought up by Ted Gioia in one of his Honest Broker posts in April, and he brought it up again in a video with Rick Beato last month.
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-rise-of-the-anonymous-music-star
The Rise of the Anonymous Music Star
Do streaming platforms view famous artists as a threat to their brands?
TED GIOIA
APR 12, 2024
How do you generate more Spotify streams than Michael Jackson or Elton John? Swedish composer Johan Röhr pulled off that impressive feat in the strangest way possible.
He hid behind 656 different pseudonyms.
Röhr isn’t famous, but that hardly matters. He has generated an astonishing 15 billion streams on Spotify, and his invisibility strategy got lots of support from the platform. These pseudonymous tracks showed up on 144 official playlists with 62 million followers in aggregate.
In some instances, Röhr accounts for 40% or more of a single playlist, albeit under a variety of artist names. Sometimes this unassuming musician is known as Ralph Kaler, at other times he goes by Sherry Novak or or Jospeh Turley or Miu Hayashi or some other identity.
-snip-
Much more at the link.
With something like this going on, it's all but guaranteed that this is work for hire and Spotify owns the songs, the tracks, and pays zero royalties.
Ditto with AI music. Gioia was made aware of a lot of it being pushed on Spotify, similar tracks with different titles and under different artist names.
All of it pushing real artists with their own music - which Spotify has to pay for - off more and more playlists.
That interview with Rick Beato, from May 14, and the part concerning what he wrote about in the post quoted above starts about 8-1/2 minutes in:
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