I feel like I’m missing something in this article. If he was taking the music but also faking the play counts with bots, how were other artists missing out?

The streaming service pays them out of a pool proportionally. So he basically diluted the distribution from that pool, resulting in lower payments to everyone else.

How is that different from Spotify producing their own AI-gen music? Seems like that’s 3-4 minutes of listening that otherwise would’ve been spent listening to an artist.