When you buy through affiliate links in our content, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Learn 
A music producer was charged by a New York District court on accounts of using bots to artificially inflate streaming time on hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks.?
A North Carolina-based music producer has been arrested for defrauding online streaming platforms of over $10 million using artificial intelligence. The accused, 52-year-old Michael Smith, was allegedly producing AI-generated audio tracks and then creating thousands of bots to automate playback to earn royalties from services such as Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Amazon Music.
According to the charges filed by the FBI, bot accounts created by Smith clocked an average of 661,440 streams every day with annual royalties of over $1.2 million. To avoid suspicion by playing just a few tracks, the producer instead distributed the efforts across hundreds of thousands of different tracks, making the fraud difficult to track. According to the FBI, Smith’s bots streamed these tracks “billions” of times, which allowed him to make more than $10 million between at least 2017 and 2024.
The FBI said Smith started working with the chief executive of an AI music company and a music promoter in 2018. These people provided Smith with thousands of music tracks each week, while he reportedly handled the upload and streaming endeavors. He notably used random names for the tracks and artists, and the uncanny similarity is what may have led to his arrest.
An “alphabetically consecutive selection” of the track titles includes “Zygophyceae,” “Zygophyllaceae,” “Zygophyllum,” “Zygopteraceae,” “Zygopteris,” and more. The same goes for artist names, such as Callous Humane,” “Callous Post,” “Callousness,” “Calm Baseball,” “Calm Connected,” “Calm Force,” etc.
Smith allegedly generated a large pool of email addresses, and used a VPN to mask the real location of the bots, which happened to be his house. He allegedly hired a team, including individuals within and outside the US, to take care of the laborious task of creating these accounts with made-up names and addresses.
Despite the efforts, the rampant music generation raised suspicion with the Mechanical Licensing Collective, a nonprofit that ensures artists and producers get their dues in royalties for digitally acquired and streamed music. The MLC, noticing the high volumes of tracks generated every month, halted Smith’s royalty payments, despite him and his legal representative repeatedly insisting he was a “human author” and demanding proof for the allegations, to which the MLC did not comply, as per the indictment document.
The current charges levied against Smith at the Southern District Court of New York include wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud, and money laundering, each of which carry maximum sentences of up to 20 years. However, the actual sentences have yet to be announced.
The incident shines light on the darker side of AI-generated content and the repeated pushback from the artist community. Streaming platforms such as Spotify have yet to formulate specific guidelines on AI-generated music and its monetization.
A simple Google search can reveal countless results that instruct you on how to get started with tools, including Google’s MusicLM, that can generate not just beats but entire songs including lyrics and vocals using simple text prompts. As with other generative AI models, the source of training data remains vague and discreet.
To counter this, over 200 high-profile musicians, including Katy Perry, Jon Bon Jovi, Stevie Wonder, Imagine Dragons, and many more have come together and signed an open letter calling for regulation of AI-generated sound and imagery that “dilute the royalty pools” and use original creations without due permission.
