Created songs with AI and earned $10 million — musician faces 60 years in prison

Musician Michael Smith was arrested in New York (USA) for fraudulently using AI to create songs. He faces 60 years in prison for illegally receiving $10 million in royalties from streaming services.

Prosecutors allege that Smith created «hundreds of thousands» songs using AI and posted them on popular music platforms, including Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube Music. The musician allegedly collaborated with the CEO of an unnamed AI music creation company and other accomplices in the United States and abroad.

According to the investigation, Smith managed a network of more than 10,000 bot accounts on streaming services. He hired people to register these accounts using fake names and addresses. To maximize his profits, Smith purchased «family plans» on streaming platforms that allowed him to create more accounts for less.

To conceal his activities, Smith used fake email addresses and VPN services. He instructed his accomplices to be «invisible» when setting up wiretaps. In emails from 2018, Smith wrote about the need to quickly create a large number of songs to circumvent the platforms’ new anti-fraud policies.

Smith’s collaboration with the AI company began around 2018. According to the prosecution, this company supplied him with between 1000 and 10,000 songs per month. Smith received full rights to these works in exchange for a share of the profits and metadata.

Smith’s scheme attracted the attention of various music market participants. In 2023, the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC)The Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) is a nonprofit organization in the United States that licenses music for digital platforms. It collects money from streaming services and distributes it to songwriters, composers, and music publishers. The MLC also maintains a database of musical works and their owners to simplify the licensing process and ensure fair payment for the use of music on the Internet. stopped paying royalties to Smith and launched an investigation. In response, Smith and his representatives have repeatedly denied the allegations of fraud.

Fraudulent schemes in the digital space take many forms, affecting not only the music industry. Recently, another case of technology abuse was uncovered in Ukraine. An IT specialist from Zakarpattia sold local IP addresses to Russians so that they could pose as Ukrainians and spread pro-Russian propaganda on the Internet.

Source: Billboard