It costs money to run the streams but Spotify pays some of that back out to the "artists"; that money sounds plausibly pretty clean. Until there was a thread at the top of HN about it and everyone suddenly knew how it worked.

Of course GP might just be a GPT3 experiment...

What does it cost an artist to run a stream? I thought Spotify hosted the content. Do you mean it costs money to run the bots that listen to the stream and get the artist recommended and heard by more people?

There are services that offer bots that increases your listening count on Spotify. People with dirty money create a bunch of artists and songs on Spotify, and use the services to increase the listening count. Spotify pay out royalties based on those numbers. So they pay the service with dirty money, and get clean money from Spotify

Dirty in, Clean out = Laundering

You need some piece of hardware for the bot to do the streaming on so it sneaks past the spotify bot detectors, and you probably also want to pay for a premium account for each bot so that you get a bigger payout on the other side, since premium users generate bigger royalties.

Making it expensive to operate an effective bot farm is part of the way that spotify tries to discourage botting. Spotify's bot detectors are good enough that it's not lucrative to just make a bunch of bots to give yourself streams for the free royalty money, but apparently not yet quite so good that it's not feasible to use bots to turn a large amount of dirty money into a lesser but still substantial amount of clean royalty money by way of funding a bot farm.

Getting out, say, half of what you put in is a losing prospect for somebody who wants a money printer, but might be acceptable to a money launderer.

You need some kind of publisher/label to get on Spotify; an individual can’t do it themselves (unless that’s changed recently). There are labels that do this for a reasonable amount of money, Like $30-50/year or so.

Distrokid et al. Easy

Who knows, maybe the bots even have legitimate Spotify listener accounts.

(In my opinion) Some hacker provides a paid service in which you have either hacked spotify accounts or well generated fakes that can run streams on fake artists accounts. Some random mafia pays these hackers to maintain their bots and to launder their money. You can even pay the hackers with the finally laundered money.

Now the hacker has to launder the money somehow. Fine, it's much less money, but still it doesn't feel like laundering rather than just straight up scamming.