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I'll bite. How does Spotify benefit from paying $10m to an artist that few people have heard of/listen to?

Easy, by using that engagement to attract 100m more users over 7 years (and I may be conservative here, since apparently they have 600m users in 2024). Which over that time will make them more than $10m, directly and indirectly. It's pretty much the Dead Internet theory fully realized.

Also, If this artist was making that much imagine how much Spotify was making on their natural cut.

What engagement? The artist and the streams were all faked by one person.

That's going to convince 100M more people to sign up?

Fake engagement attracts real engagement. It's a very classic strategy to "grow quickly", because users see a content creator has, say 1-10k subs and they'll be more inclined to view/listen than to someone with no views/subs. And the algorithm will be more likely to recommend that artist. It's popularity bias.

Clearly this artist didn't build that 100m subscriber base by himself over 7 years, but Spotify itself definitely employed this tactic of botting to increase its popularity. Same idea: "wow Spotify has this many people here? I should try it out!".

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