Man earned over $8 million on AI music, which he himself streamed billions of times through fake accounts

Music streaming services have long struggled with inflated listenership. But the scheme of 54-year-old Michael Smith from North Carolina stood out for its scale: he used artificial intelligence to mass-produce songs and bots to inflate their plays.

According to court documents, which Music Business Worldwide cites, from 2017 to 2024, Smith controlled thousands of fake accounts on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. These automatically played music, for which he received royalties.

However, repeatedly playing a few of the same songs millions of times was risky: platforms might notice unnatural activity and detect fraud. Therefore, Smith distributed the fake listens among a large number of tracks.

For this, he needed a vast catalog. According to the prosecution, Smith used artificial intelligence to obtain hundreds of thousands of songs. As a result, thousands of his bot accounts listened to them billions of times. The more tracks there were, the less suspicious the statistics for each one appeared.

In October 2018, Smith himself described the logic of the scheme in an email: to avoid suspicion, "a lot of content with a small number of listens" was needed.

In the early stages, he emailed himself a calculation according to which 1040 bot accounts could generate about 661 thousand plays per day. Later, according to the prosecution, up to 10 thousand such accounts were operating simultaneously during certain periods.

The scale of the fraud is well illustrated by one example provided by the prosecution. In April 2023, the entire catalog of Taylor Swift on YouTube Music received approximately 9.3 million plays through family plans. In the same month, Smith's bot accounts, using the same plans, listened to his music 80.9 million times—almost nine times more.

Smith was arrested in September 2024. According to the prosecution, during the scheme's operation, he received over $14 million from organizations that paid royalties. However, not all of this money was considered damages: in calculating the damages, payments for genuine listens to his music were deducted, as well as the money he himself paid for the bot-using accounts. As a result, the parties agreed on a sum of just over $8.09 million.

The defense emphasized that the creation of music using artificial intelligence and its publication on streaming platforms is not illegal in itself. The case concerned Smith's use of thousands of fake accounts to inflate listens and receive real money for them.

In March 2026, Smith pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The prosecution requested a sentence of at least 46 months in prison, while the defense sought no imprisonment.

On October 6, the court sentenced Smith to 18 months in prison and an additional two years of supervised release after his release. The court also ordered him to forfeit the previously determined amount.

Both the prosecution and the defense called this case the first criminal prosecution of its kind in the US. It combined two parts of a single scheme: artificial intelligence allowed for the creation of hundreds of thousands of songs, and bots created billions of fake listens for them.

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