A 54-year-old North Carolina singer in the United States, Michael Smith, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for using thousands of automated accounts to fraudulently generate billions of streams of artificial intelligence-generated songs and earn more than $8m in royalties from music streaming platforms.
The United States Department of Justice disclosed this in a statement published on Tuesday, noting that Smith was convicted of conspiring to commit wire fraud in what prosecutors described as the department’s first criminal case involving AI-assisted music streaming fraud.
According to the Justice Department, Smith operated the scheme between 2017 and 2024, using fake accounts to repeatedly stream songs he owned on platforms including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music.
Investigators said he created thousands of fraudulent accounts using fake email addresses and fraudulently obtained debit cards.
He also used artificial intelligence to generate hundreds of thousands of songs, which were repeatedly played through the accounts to inflate streaming figures and generate royalty payments.
The department said Smith sometimes operated as many as 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously.
He distributed the streams across a large catalogue of songs to avoid attracting attention to unusually high streaming figures for individual tracks.
Prosecutors highlighted the scale of the operation by comparing Smith’s fraudulent streaming figures with those of American pop star Taylor Swift.
In April 2023, Smith’s automated accounts generated 80.9 million streams of his AI-generated songs through YouTube Music family plans, while Swift’s entire catalogue received 9.3 million streams through the same type of plan during the month.
The Justice Department said Smith fraudulently obtained more than $8m in royalties through the scheme.
In addition to the 18-month prison sentence, he was ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 and serve two years of supervised release.
US Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Jamie McDonald, said, “Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” adding that the operation deprived genuine musicians and their fans of millions of dollars in royalty payments.
The case highlights concerns about the use of automated accounts and AI-generated content to manipulate music streaming figures and divert royalties from legitimate artists and songwriters.
