The story of Michael Smith ended with a fine from 8.1 million dollars. It’s the latest chapter in a story that first hit newspapers in September 2024when Michael Smith was introduced to the world as the man who had succeeded scam Spotify with artificial intelligence. A 54-year-old former musician, Smith lived in a small town in North Carolina. His plan had two parts: first he created a long series of songs with artificial intelligence and published everything on the platforms. Then he moved on tocollection: Created thousands of bots to listen to AI-generated songs.
An orchestra of algorithmslistened to for an audience of algorithms who were however making money in the real world. We remain on Spotify, even though the plan had expanded to other apps. The platform pays artists for the playback of each individual song. The more songs you listen to, the more you earn. A system that Smith knew well, given that he was also a musician. Between the 2018 and 2024 with his network he had managed to create a machine from 661,000 streams per day which according to investigations had allowed him to collect approximately 8 million dollars thanks to royalties derived from copyright.
We have recovered the sentence, published on the official website of the New York court that sentenced Smith. The prosecutor writes Jay Clayton: “Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed them billions of times. Although the songs and listeners were fictitious, the millions of dollars Smith stole were real.” The problem, according to Clayton, is linked to the fact that the royalties ended up in Smith’s pocket and reduced the portion of the compensation intended for all other artists on the platform.
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How did Smith hide for years
Smith’s trick was to aim for the distribution. Let’s do a quick calculation. 661,000 streams per day is more than 20 million streams per month. To clarify: Sfera Ebbastaamong the most listened to artists on Spotify in Italy, arrives at 6 million streams per month. Smith would have been easy to spot if he had concentrated everything on one artist.
The choice was to broaden the number of artists from which the songs came, aiming to distribute the streaming as much as possible. In this way the fortune he was accumulating was not immediately evident. Now, in addition to the $8.1 million fine, Smith also faces the prison for wire fraud: The maximum sentence is five years. Sentencing is expected July.
