Regarding the 'hacking', it never happened to me, but it's easy to see how troublesome that may be. But that's what we get for trusting an application that promises to get us free music forever. It had to have drawbacks, eventually.
Flesh this out for me, because it's hilarious. How are Spotify making money from that, exactly? I listen to Discover Weekly most weeks, and if Spotify is generating them, then:
A) They're creating some amazing music, so more power to them
B) They're putting a hell of a lot of work into creating back stories for these bands
The work they have in making a few artists up is nothing compared to what they would have to pay for an actual artist to have their albuns there.
For Discover Weekly to work though, it helps to feed it good data. It's based on a PageRank-like system, but instead of webpages it's based on user playlists [1]. If you create some of your own playlists, it will go and find other songs that appear regularly on similar playlists. Personally, I've made a large 800-track playlist of music I listen to while coding ([2] if anyone else is interested), and another with every song ever played at a goth/industrial nightclub I used to go to.
I rarely see "made up" artists, but I often like the ones I have been recommended - I really like "Time" on Nowi's EP called Reunion. It's actually made by Firefly Entertainment [3], a Swedish music production company that usually makes film & TV show soundtracks.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2015/9/30/9416579/spotify-discover-...
[2] https://open.spotify.com/user/syneryder/playlist/5YpeoHyEHG7...
https://open.spotify.com/user/syneryder/playlist/3AOszFh3njR...
It's possible there's a lot of low quality filler music on Spotify and that your account got algorithmically lumped in the bucket to get there recommended, but to say Spotify is "in on it" seems like a very big leap.