A North Carolina musician received an 18-month prison sentence for collecting more than $10 million in royalties from Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Michael Smith, 54, pleaded guilty in March after federal authorities indicted him in September 2024. The illegal operation ran between 2017 and 2024 to inflate listening numbers artificially.
Court documents show Smith worked with the chief executive officer of an artificial intelligence music company and an unnamed music promoter. The group uploaded hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs purchased from an accomplice onto major streaming platforms. Automated artificial intelligence bots then streamed these tracks billions of times.
Smith used bots to bypass platform controls
Smith routed the bots through virtual private networks to bypass platform anti-fraud controls. At the operation's peak, the setup used more than 1,000 bot accounts to boost listening metrics. A financial breakdown emailed by Smith in October 2017 showed he managed 52 cloud service accounts containing 20 bot accounts each.
Daily estimates from the 2017 email indicated each bot streamed about 636 songs daily, totaling roughly 661,440 streams per day. Royalty earnings averaged half a cent per stream, bringing in daily revenues of $3,307.20. Monthly earnings reached $99,216, while annual earnings crossed $1.2 million.
Smith emailed accomplices in October 2018 to demand a large volume of songs to bypass updated platform anti-fraud policies. He stressed the need for substantial content spread across small stream counts to avoid detection by platform operators. A February 2024 email from Smith stated the tracks generated over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019.
Smith stole millions from genuine artists
U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald stated that Smith stole millions in royalty payouts from genuine artists and their fans by replacing consumers with automated bots and creativity with fake songs. The Department of Justice provided a comparison noting that Taylor Swift's entire catalogue received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music from family plans in April 2023. During the same month, Smith's bot accounts used family plans to fraudulently play his artificial intelligence music 80.9 million times.
The court ordered Smith to serve an additional two years of supervised release alongside his 18-month federal prison sentence. He must also pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture.
