Sentenced to prison for using AI to create music and 'fake' listeners

Michael Smith, 54 years old, living in North Carolina, was sentenced this week to 18 months in prison, two years of probation, and had to pay a fine of more than $8 million for defrauding online music streaming platforms and stealing royalties.

"Michael Smith took advantage of AI to commit fraud," said Jamie McDonald, prosecutor at the US Attorney's Office in charge of the Southern District of New York.

In September 2025, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) arrested Smith on charges of streaming fraud and pocketing millions of dollars in royalties by controlling an army of bots to "plow" views for AI-generated music.

Smith pleaded guilty in March this year. This person was determined to be cheating in three steps, lasting from 2017 to 2024. The first was to create thousands of bot accounts on platforms such as Spotify, YouTube Music, Apple Music, Amazon Music to stream music. Next, control the bot account to continuously play songs that are believed to belong to you, but are actually created by AI. Finally, collect royalties based on the number of virtual music listens.

Tom's Hardware said that the case investigated by the FBI has revealed many surprising statistics. For example, in April 2023, Smith's bot account used the family plan to stream 80.9 million AI music streams. By comparison, singer Taylor Swift's entire music catalog received 9.3 million streams on YouTube Music through its family plan during the same period.

Smith also spread the autoplays across thousands of songs to avoid creating an unusual number of plays for any single song, making the platforms unsuspecting. At one point, this person used 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously to commit fraud.

The Guardian quoted comments from Tuki's account on Twitter that Smith "used AI to create both music and an audience", making millions of dollars from "music that no one really listens to". Artists and the music industry will now have to "fight non-existent songs that are listened to by non-real people", Tuki commented.