AI Music Fraudster Forced To Face The Music With 18-Month Sentence
A North Carolina musician has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for orchestrating an automated streaming fraud scheme that siphoned over $10 million in royalty payouts using artificial intelligence and bot farms.
Michael Smith, a musician and former industry executive (not to be mistaken for singer Michael W. Smith), had used generative AI to mass-produce hundreds of thousands of short, rudimentary tracks. According to federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, Smith then coordinated thousands of automated bots to stream these AI-generated tracks billions of times across major streaming platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. To avoid triggering any platform anomaly alarms, Smith deliberately distributed the artificial plays across an expansive catalog of thousands of track titles, keeping individual stream counts low enough to evade fraud filters while accumulating massive sums in aggregate.
The scale of the operation rivaled or even surpassed the engagement...
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