Musician gets 18 months for $8m streaming fraud using bots and AI songs that outstreamed Taylor Swift

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Michael Smith, a 54 year old musician from Cornelius, North Carolina, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for a streaming fraud scheme using AI generated songs and bots, Ars Technica reports. Prosecutors call it the first federal criminal case over AI assisted streaming fraud. Smith pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was sentenced on 6 October by US District Judge John G. Koeltl

The scheme ran from 2017 to 2024 across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. Smith created thousands of bot accounts using fake emails and fraudulently obtained debit cards. The Justice Department says up to 10,000 were running at the same time. The songs were AI generated, hundreds of thousands of them, bought from the head of an AI music company

The scale is remarkable. Prosecutors say the bots racked up billions of streams and more than $8 million in royalties. One email from Smith in February 2024 boasted of over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019. In April 2023 alone, his bots generated 80.9 million YouTube Music family plan streams, compared with 9.3 million for Taylor Swift's whole catalogue on the same platform that month

Smith's own emails were damning. In 2018 he wrote that they needed to get a ton of songs fast to work around the anti fraud policies the platforms were using. The government asked for 46 months in prison, while his lawyers asked for probation, arguing he first believed what he was doing was lawful. On top of the 18 months, he must forfeit $8,091,843.64 and serve two years of supervised release

When he pleaded guilty, the then US Attorney Jay Clayton said that although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole were real. That is the key point for me. Streaming royalties come from a shared pot, so every fake stream takes money from real artists. AI makes this kind of fraud far easier, and platforms will need much better detection

Was 18 months a fair sentence? And how can streaming services stop bots and AI songs gaming the system?

Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swiftarstechnica.com