CORNELIUS, N.C. — A man from Cornelius was sentenced to 18 months in prison for a scheme that used artificial intelligence and automated bot accounts to steal more than $8 million in music streaming royalties.
Michael Smith pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud in March and was sentenced this week.
Prosecutors said Smith set up thousands of fake user profiles on streaming services like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music. He then used software to continuously stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks he owned, before collecting royalty payments derived from the falsified plays.
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The Department of Justice said it’s the first case of this kind in the United States.
To prevent streaming services from detecting unusual spikes on any single track, Smith spread automated plays across thousands of separate tracks. In an email outlining his plan to bypass platform anti-fraud rules, Smith noted that he needed “a TON of songs fast” to make the scheme work.
The AI-generated songs were uploaded using randomly generated song titles and artist names like “Calypso Xored,” “Calorie Event,” “Calm Knuckles,” “Zygotes,” and many more.
The Department of Justice says the scheme lasted for years, running from 2017 to 2024.
In just one month in 2023, Smith’s bot accounts generated 80.9 million streams for artificial tracks. By comparison, Taylor Swift’s entire song catalog on YouTube Music received only 9.3 million streams in that same month.
Smith will also serve two years of supervised release after his prison term, and he’s been ordered to pay back more than $8 million.
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