Automating buying up GPUs when there is a huge demand or shortage* and no risk simple fraud free money from Spotify don't seem any similar to me morally or legally.
* unless there is a special offer by the shop that only allows a limited number of purchases by person. Breaking that would be much closer
With fake bot streams it is pretty clearly stealing from the other artists who would otherwise get a greater share of the royalties pool. I see your point, but I really have to stretch my imagination to call them morally equivalent.
In terms of choosing the con, the guy calls himself a musician so he probably just fell into it. I bet there was a slippery slope effect: use bots "just a bit" at first to juice the algorithm for his own real songs. Then dabbling with AI generation to tweak the algorithm more, oh the royalty payments feel good, maybe a few more bots...