- A man fraudulently boosted his music streams using an army of bots
- He was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his actions
- He made over $8 million from the scheme across various platforms
A man has received an 18-month prison sentence after he used a horde of bots to help him rake in $8 million in royalties for his AI-generated music. He’ll have to forfeit all the money he made during his endeavor, which lasted from 2017 to 2024, but he managed to avoid a harsher punishment.
Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, uploaded hundreds of thousands of songs to streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, then used over 1,000 bots to artificially inflate the listening statistics for his tracks to billions of plays. This netted him millions of dollars based on the platforms’ per-stream payment plans.
According to TechSpot, Smith admitted to using 52 cloud service accounts that each had access to 20 bots, putting 1,040 AI agents at his disposal. Connected to VPNs, these bots could stream roughly 636 songs per day, meaning around 661,440 daily plays for Smith.
The US Justice Department (DoJ) put the estimate even higher, saying that Smith deployed up to 10,000 bots at a time. It added that in April 2023, Taylor Swift’s music received 9.3 million plays on YouTube Music. Smith’s music, in contrast, was played 80.9 million times on YouTube Music in the same period.
Smith was charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy in September 2024. He pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiring to commit wire fraud in March 2026. He faced a sentence of up to five years’ imprisonment, but in the end was sent down for 18 months and was ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64. He will also face two years of supervised release at the end of his sentence.
The news comes as Google has announced that it has watermarked 240,000 years’ worth of AI-generated audio and 180 billion AI images and videos using its SynthID Detector tool. Initially available to pro users, SynthID Detector can now be used by anyone and will work with content made by Google, OpenAI, Nvidia and Kakao, with Apple soon following.
Large-scale engagement fraud
It’s important to note that Smith was not prosecuted for making AI-generated music — while many will wish they could banish all AI music from their Spotify feeds, creating tunes this way will not yet get the cops on your case.
Instead, Smith found himself on the wrong side of the law for the way in which he monetized his AI music. By flooding platforms with bot-led artificial engagement, Smith misrepresented the popularity of his tracks and reaped the financial rewards of doing so. As the DoJ put it, “streaming fraud diverts funds from musicians and songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming.”
Smith is certainly not the only person artificially boosting their listener counts on music platforms. But when you’re making $8 million from doing so, it’s likely that the authorities will start to pay attention.
Unfortunately, AI has made it absolutely trivial for people to whip up a complete track in seconds, load it onto streaming platforms, then watch the earnings roll in. On the flip side, actually making cash from this kind of endeavor is far from straightforward.
As Vice President of Apple Music Oliver Schusser explained, more than a third of the tracks on the platform are “100% AI,” yet they get “below 0.5% of usage,” meaning barely anyone is listening to AI tunes. But perhaps that reflects a wider problem with streaming platforms: while they might have enormous libraries of music, the vast majority of artists — AI or otherwise — will not see any kind of significant engagement or return.
That’s a broader problem than the one highlighted by Smith’s actions. But with AI making it faster and easier than ever to gain a presence in the world of music streaming, I’m sure we’ll be hearing about more cases like his in the not-so-distant future.
