A 54-year-old man in the United States, Michael Smith, has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence-generated music and automated streaming accounts to fraudulently obtain more than $8m in royalties.
Smith, a resident of North Carolina, was sentenced on October 6 by a US federal judge after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to the US Department of Justice.
He was also ordered to serve two years of supervised release and forfeit $8,091,843.64 obtained through the fraudulent operation.
The department said Smith carried out the scheme between 2017 and 2024 by creating thousands of fake accounts on major music streaming platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
He allegedly deployed software to make the accounts repeatedly stream songs under his control, most of which were generated using artificial intelligence.
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 detection systems.
In comparison, Taylor Swift’s entire music catalogue recorded 9.3 million streams through the same category during the period, prosecutors said.
The department said the fraudulent streams enabled Smith to collect royalty payments that should have gone to legitimate musicians, songwriters and other rights holders whose music was played by genuine listeners.
US Attorney Jamie McDonald said Smith exploited artificial intelligence technology to defraud music streaming platforms and deprive legitimate artistes of their earnings.
The case was prosecuted by the Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit of the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
The Department of Justice described the case as its first criminal prosecution involving AI-assisted music streaming fraud, highlighting growing concerns over the potential misuse of emerging technologies to manipulate digital platforms and exploit royalty payment systems..
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