I'm 90% sure that music labels pay to "put their thumbs on the scales" with these recommendation algorithms in order to push their "hot" artists. I wonder how many of these problems are a result of that.

Personally I’m more suspicious of “classic” artists, where the royalty and songwriting picture might be very skewed behind the scenes. The corporate owners of Spotify favouring one catalog of, say, “70s music” versus another could lead to a long-term capture of that category with little reaction or awareness.

Hot artists, in my estimation, are more about bot campaigns to kick off and sweeten ‘hotness’ as they’re in an ongoing war against other talent of the moment (with shady labels on all sides).

Every popular spotify playlist has a bunch of good songs and then like one or two "huh?" songs sprinkled in. It's really obvious what's going on.

We can never know for sure if this is or isn't the case, so our only hope for stuff we can be confident isn't this way is with foss / self host able solutions

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