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

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.

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