> Juicing some streaming numbers hurt who? Spotify's margin?

You don't seem to understand how the streaming revenue model works, and why this is an egregious fraud against the public interest. You believe that stream fraud is someone simply stealing from Spotify/YouTube/etc, so who cares.

In reality, all musicians share a pool of revenue across ads + subscriptions on each platform (typically two-thirds of the total, although each platform has a different rev share model).

This fraud only marginally impacts Spotify financials, as their cut is fixed and taken from the topline [1]. But someone abusing the system like this guy breaks the model for everyone. Not only you're stealing money from millions of musicians, but you're undermining the confidence in the whole industry.

I don't have an opinion if this merits jail time or not, but yes, this is pretty bad. Like money counterfeiting-bad.

[1] ps: of course, if this becomes rampant, musicians get screwed and turn against Spotify, so it's in their best interest to do whatever it take down the fraudsters. It's a never-ending cat-and-mouse game.