North Carolina Man Gets 18 Months for AI Music Fraud, Forfeits $8 Million

Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for manipulating streaming royalties across Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music between 2017 and 2024. The DOJ calls it the first criminal prosecution involving AI-assisted music-streaming fraud.

• Smith used bots to generate billions of streams for AI-generated songs on four platforms
• In April 2023 alone, his tracks received 80.9 million YouTube Music streams
• Taylor Swift's entire catalog got 9.3 million streams in that category the same period
• Bot networks ranged from roughly 1,040 to 10,000 accounts across the operation