Milli Vanilli, Boney M. just to name two. This isn't a modern phenomenon. It might not have been so easy to pull it off. Or maybe it was. It was the time befor

Milli Vanilli, Boney M. just to name two. This isn't a modern phenomenon. It might not have been so easy to pull it off. Or maybe it was. It was the time before people played or sang live on TV. So there was less risk then in the years were live performance in a TV studio became somewhat of the norm. And for generated music to be profitable it probably "just" needs to have a lot of songs one would not skip when they are part of some automatic play lists or "radio stations" playing stuff similar to x or y. This way while any one song would only have few streams the overall oeuvre of the creator could be quite profitable. The same as with any auto-generated product targeting the long tail in Amazon (think T-shirts with quotes).