A 54-year-old man in North Carolina, United States, Michael Smith, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence-generated songs and automated streaming accounts to fraudulently obtain more than $8 million in music royalties.
According to the US Department of Justice, Smith was sentenced on October 6 after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He was also handed two years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 obtained through the scheme.
The department said Smith carried out the fraud between 2017 and 2024 by creating thousands of fake accounts on streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
He allegedly used automated software to make the accounts repeatedly stream songs he controlled, most of which were generated using AI.
Prosecutors said Smith created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and distributed the artificial streams across thousands of tracks to evade the platforms’ anti-fraud systems.
At the peak of the operation, he reportedly used up to 10,000 automated accounts simultaneously, generating billions of streams and collecting royalties from the platforms.
The scale of the scheme became evident in April 2023, when Smith’s accounts generated 80.9 million streams for his AI-generated music on YouTube Music through family plans. By comparison, Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue recorded 9.3 million streams through the same category during the period, prosecutors said.
The Justice Department said the scheme diverted royalty payments from musicians and songwriters whose music was streamed by genuine listeners.
US Attorney Jamie McDonald said Smith exploited AI technology to defraud streaming platforms and deprive legitimate artistes of their royalties.
The case was prosecuted by the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.