The article has 3 examples. Two have easily identified 3rd-party labels, the last is unclear. Neither is a traditional label, but there is also no indication they are owned by Spotify.
> People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.
What bands would people expect in a playlist of background music? In fact, one is from a provider of royalty-free background music - which seems like exactly what you would expect in such a playlist. You could argue that it's not really jazz, which is understandable, but I'll file that gripe along with my anger that "New Metal Tracks" features lots of metalcore.
Metalcore is the top 100 music of metal, I doubt it’s going to change anytime soon. I’d guess what ever is not metalcore, is probably cheesy power metal like Sabaton or Gloryhammer.
It would be a bit like if Google-search for some product showed products created by Google on top of the list, but not really even revealing they were products by Google.
I have no information about if this kind of thing is happening but the article suggests there is evidence to suspect it is. Weird artists nobody knows about being on top of the list. How did they get to be top of the list?
Streaming services betray their users expectations in many ways. For instance, Spotify has playlists that are called "This is [artist]" for many artists, and you could reasonably believe they were human made, or at least partially human made (unless Spotify served you up one for a very obscure artist, but they rarely do).
But they aren't even looked at by a human. If you have several artists with the same name, it all gets mixed up in the "This is X" playlist. "This is Glenn Jones" contains music both by the guitarist Glenn Jones, the soul singer Glenn Jones, and the Australian country singer Glenn Jones.
The author does criticize the title: "Even the term fake artists doesn’t really do justice to the scope of the situation—because, as we have seen, it’s not the musicians, real or otherwise, who are at the root of the situation, but the dominant players in the industry."
If I were to run with it I'd say the streaming platform is also fake. People buy it expecting a curated playlist of music they want to hear, and instead what they get is a curated playlist of music that sounds similar to what they want to hear.