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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).

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

Using the historical record that they absolutely did this, there is no reason to give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not now doing this.

Spotify was advised of payola scheme in federal court in the US, unfortunately last month the judge ruled that the TOS prevention of lawsuits against Spotify is legal.

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.