Page 14 - IAV Digital Magazine #605

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
‘Musician’ Arrested for Using AI Songs And A Bot Army To Scam Spotify For Millions In Royalties
By Luis Prada
Is this the future of AI scamming? Michael Smith, a 52-year-old from Cornelius, North Carolina, allegedly used AI to automati- cally generate hun- dreds of thousands of songs that he then put on streaming
services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. He’s accused of using an army of bots to “lis- ten” to the tracks that he created with no effort and likely no musical talent.
That netted him over $10 million in stream- ing royalties.
Now, Smith has been indicted for what the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI called a “brazen fraud scheme.” He has been charged with wire fraud con- spiracy, wire fraud, and money launder- ing conspiracy.
The scheme dates back at least to 2018, when Smith part- nered up with an AI music company and a music producer to mass-produce an enormous catalog of tunes. He created several fake accounts to spread the music around so it wouldn’t seem like one person suddenly could create fully pro- duced tracks at rates faster than any known person in the history of the human race. He has a net- work of bots listening to them at a rate of around 661,440 streams per day.
Streaming services usually have fraud detection systems in place, but at every step of the way, Smith figured out a method of circum- venting detection. For a while at least.
He pulled it off by creating randomized song and artist names that were convincing enough to provide an air of legitimacy. Garbage, total nonsense band names like Calm Identity and Zygotic Washstands and many thousands of others, according to the indictment.
Variety reports that a nonprofit group called the Mechanical Licensing Collective, which ensures musi- cal artists get the roy- alties they are owed from streaming serv- ices, confronted him in 2023. They thought something smelled fishy, so they looked into the bil- lions of streams associated with Smith. He denied any wrongdoing. Now he faces up to 20 years in prison for each of the charges.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgQ9TparK_A&t=33s
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine