The white noise stuff is entirely different from this... the two problems with the white noise podcasts are 1) it sneaks into the recommendation algorithm. The

The white noise stuff is entirely different from this... the two problems with the white noise podcasts are 1) it sneaks into the recommendation algorithm. There's legitimate reasons to want to listen to white noise, but the likelihood that someone listening to a podcast wants to next listen to 3 hours of white noise is effectively 0. 2) perception of fairness due to the "artist pool" that Spotify uses. Is it fair that a team of musicians, singers, engineers, etc. gets paid the same for a stream as someone who just uploaded 3 hours of white noise? Debatable. (I'm sure this will start happening with AI/procedurally generated music at some point, too.) The users listening to the white noise are real people who are paying or hearing ads. It's not really relevant to the article at hand. > The article also mentions the journalist talked to the police who have kind of confirmed it. > The Swedish company said it was not aware of any contact made by law enforcement If there's no actual case, it just means someone in law enforcement sent an email. They may have been told the story by the very same "anonymous gang member."