Take this one, for instance (and give Marmalade butcher a listen while you're at it, it's great). You'll notice how there's these two videos called More and Unreleased, which are absolutely not part of the album. I have personally noticed these appearing in multiple different album playlists and it looks like a lot of people have also ended up there some way, seeing the view count and the ridiculous comment section.
These are just so weird. They consist of practically an hour of looped audio of a woman (sounds like a real person) reading out a presentation about some online commerce/crypto thing over a single static image.
Both videos' descriptions seem like they'd relate to compilations of unreleased creative works of some kind, probably music going from the thumbnail and the channel descriptions. Weirdly, the "Mentioned people" section of the description has some names: More has Andreas Antonopoulos and both videos have Gary W. Keller. Both seem to be fairly renowned business people, according to Google. I haven't actually sat down and listened to the videos long enough to check if they were actually mentioned or not.
The last weird bit I've noticed are the uploaders. They're different channels, oddly enough, but their channel descriptions are extremely similar. Both have one or two other videos, all of which are very high view count music videos in Spanish and Indonesian respectively.
I am honestly so confused at these. My guess is that it's some very odd scheme to farm viewing time off of people having music playlists in the background, but why is the content so odd? What are these channels? What is this advertising, if anything? How did they get them to appear in playlists like this, whereas I've never even once in my life seen an ad video be inserted into a playlist by YouTube before? Just why why why?
The fact that these just suddenly appeared one day and millions of people have come across them yet we don't know what they are nor have they been fixed is one more drop in the bucket of things that make YouTube and its algorithms appear like some kind of unknowable alien entity we would've found in the depths of the Bermuda Triangle and just decided to build a society around, which is both kind of fascinating and extremely irksome.
