Man jailed for using AI to make music and fake listeners
A rather unusual fraud case in the music industry has just reached a verdict, and I think it's worth recounting. According to VnExpress, Michael Smith, 54, from North Carolina in the United States, was sentenced to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release, and ordered to pay more than 8 million USD in fines for defrauding online music platforms to take royalties.
Jamie McDonald, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, said Smith exploited AI to commit the fraud. The FBI arrested him in September 2025, and he pleaded guilty in March of this year. The scheme ran from 2017 to 2024 in three steps: creating thousands of bot accounts on Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and Amazon Music; using those accounts to play songs generated by AI non-stop while claiming them as his own works; and then collecting royalties based on fake listening counts.
The number that caught my attention is this: according to Tom's Hardware, in April 2023 Smith's bot accounts streamed 80.9 million AI tracks through family plans, while Taylor Swift's entire catalogue reached only 9.3 million plays on YouTube Music through family plans in the same period. To avoid detection, he spread the plays across thousands of songs, so no single track showed unusual listening numbers, and at one point he ran as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once.
The article also quotes a comment on X, arguing that Smith used AI to create both the music and the audience, earning millions of dollars from songs that in reality nobody listened to. For me, this story is a reminder that artists and the music industry will increasingly have to tell real listeners apart from fake ones.
Source: VnExpress
Jamie McDonald, a prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, said Smith exploited AI to commit the fraud. The FBI arrested him in September 2025, and he pleaded guilty in March of this year. The scheme ran from 2017 to 2024 in three steps: creating thousands of bot accounts on Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music and Amazon Music; using those accounts to play songs generated by AI non-stop while claiming them as his own works; and then collecting royalties based on fake listening counts.
The number that caught my attention is this: according to Tom's Hardware, in April 2023 Smith's bot accounts streamed 80.9 million AI tracks through family plans, while Taylor Swift's entire catalogue reached only 9.3 million plays on YouTube Music through family plans in the same period. To avoid detection, he spread the plays across thousands of songs, so no single track showed unusual listening numbers, and at one point he ran as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once.
The article also quotes a comment on X, arguing that Smith used AI to create both the music and the audience, earning millions of dollars from songs that in reality nobody listened to. For me, this story is a reminder that artists and the music industry will increasingly have to tell real listeners apart from fake ones.
Source: VnExpress
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