A man from North Carolina has owned up to a huge trick that let him pocket more than twelve million dollars from music streaming services.
Michael Smith admitted his guilt in federal court for running a scheme that fooled Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music into paying him royalties he never earned fairly.
The 54 year old bought hundreds of thousands of songs made entirely by artificial intelligence from a partner. He then loaded these tracks onto the major platforms and set up smart computer programs to play them over and over again billions of times.
Court papers from when he faced charges in September 2024 show that Smith worked with an unnamed music promoter and the head of an AI music firm.
Together, they pumped up the play counts on his fake songs from 2017 through 2024. To stay hidden from the platform’s safety checks, he made sure the programs connected through different virtual private networks each time.
Back in October 2018, Smith sent a message to his partners explaining the careful plan. He wrote that they needed a huge number of different songs, but only a few plays on each one, so nobody would notice anything strange. He stressed getting lots of new tracks quickly to dodge the growing checks these services were putting in place.
During the busiest time, Smith ran more than a thousand fake accounts at once to push up the numbers. In one note to himself from October 2017, he listed out his setup of 52 different cloud accounts, each holding 20 bot programs ready to go.
He figured each program could handle about 636 songs every day, which added up to more than 660000 plays across the whole system daily.
At roughly half a cent paid for each play, that meant over three thousand dollars coming in per day, close to one hundred thousand per month, and well over one million dollars in a full year.
The US Attorney Jay Clayton spoke clearly about the case. He said Smith created thousands of pretend songs with AI, then played them billions of times using fake listeners.
Even though nothing about the music or the audience was real, the money he took was actual cash stolen from honest musicians and copyright owners. Clayton added that this bold plan has now ended with Smith found guilty of a serious federal offense involving artificial intelligence.
Investigators explained that the bots played hundreds of thousands of AI generated tracks billions of times in total, which brought Smith around twelve million dollars in payments.
In an email from February 2024, he proudly confirmed the scale, saying the collection had reached over four billion streams and twelve million dollars in royalties starting from 2019.
As part of his guilty plea to one charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, Smith will hand over more than eight million dollars. He could receive up to five years behind bars when sentenced.
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