US man Smith sentenced to 18 months for streaming fraud — Ars Technica
In the United States, 54-year-old North Carolina resident Michael Smith was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to a fraudulent scheme involving music streaming services. The court also ordered the forfeiture of $8,091,843.64. Ars Technica reports.
AI-generated songs and fake accounts
According to the US Department of Justice, Smith began the scheme in 2017 and avoided detection for seven years. He used fake email addresses and fraudulently obtained debit cards to create thousands of accounts on Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Software directed bots to continuously listen to tracks whose rights, according to Smith, belonged to him. The Department of Justice said these songs were created using artificial intelligence. Before his arrest in 2024, the man had created hundreds of thousands of such tracks, according to the department.
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Billions of artificial streams
The automated plays were distributed across a large number of tracks to avoid drawing attention through massive plays of a single song. In total, the bots generated billions of streams. According to the US Department of Justice, in April 2023, Smith's tracks were played 80.9 million times, while singer Taylor Swift's entire catalog had 9.3 million plays during the same period.
The Department of Justice noted that such actions reduced payments to genuine performers, who receive royalties from shared pools on streaming platforms. Smith's defense asked for probation, emphasizing his remorse and ability to work in the recording industry. Prosecutors, however, said that he used increasingly sophisticated methods to sustain the artificial streams and lied to law enforcement.
