I'm not sure thats how it works. For the artist to get paid, the fake listener has to be paying a subscription.
Unless it is money laundering, this excuse makes no sense
Unless it is money laundering, this excuse makes no sense
The gist is that your listening hours for your subscription are pooled with everybody else’s, then artist payments are made out of ratios from that pool. That means if you subscribe and listen to music 24hrs a day, and somebody else subscribes and listens to 1hr a day, you essentially have more influence over the pool of money and so can pay out to the artist you are listening to more than you pay Spotify.
here's an industry blog report on the problem:
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/great-big-spotify-sca...
This means what individuals pay doesn’t matter at all to the artists they listen to. All you need to do is rack up a lot of listening hours, to have an outsized impact on the resultant listening hours pool. Then if enough other subscribers barely listen to any music, you can earn more than the $10 you put in.