U.S. prosecutors recently announced that a man who obtained more than $8 million in royalties from multiple music streaming platforms by uploading large numbers of AI-generated songs and using thousands of robot accounts to boost traffic has pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and could face up to five years in prison, and agreed to hand over more than $8.09 million in illegal gains.

According to court documents, Michael Smith, 52, from Cornelius, North Carolina, and his accomplices committed large-scale fraud against platforms such as Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube from 2017 to 2024, defrauding royalties by artificially increasing the playback volume of AI songs.

In order to avoid concentrating a large number of views on a few tracks and causing platform risk control alerts, Smith adopted a "break it into parts" strategy: obtain hundreds of thousands of AI-generated music from his associates, and then disperse the false playbacks to these tracks, allocating a smaller brush amount to each song to reduce the risk of abnormality.

These tracks were not released under the names of real musicians, but under a series of AI-generated fictitious stage names, including “Calm Baseball”, “Calm Connected”, “Calm Knuckles”, “Calliope Bloom”, “Calliope Erratum”, “Callous” and “Callous Humane”, etc., further concealing the main operator behind them.

At the peak of its operation, the brush network was said to operate on 52 cloud service accounts, with 20 robot accounts running under each cloud account, for a total of 1,040 robots.

Smith estimated that each account can play about 636 songs per day, and access different platforms through VPN disguise, which can generate about 661,440 plays per day.

Based on a rough calculation of a royalty of 0.5 cents per play, this system can theoretically bring in about US$3,307 per day, about US$99,216 per month, and more than US$1.2 million per year.

In an email in February 2024, Smith claimed that since 2019, his songs have been played more than 4 billion times and he has earned more than $12 million in royalties.

However, according to the case statement released by U.S. prosecutors, Smith actually received more than $8 million in royalties from the scheme, and the relevant amounts will now be recovered.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York said Smith has pleaded guilty to one count of "conspiracy to commit wire fraud."

He is expected to be sentenced on July 29 and faces up to five years in prison. He has also agreed to forfeit $8,091,843.64 in illegal gains.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement: "Michael Smith used artificial intelligence to generate thousands of fake songs, and then played these fake songs billions of times by driving traffic.

While the songs and audience were fake, the millions of dollars he stole were real money that should have belonged to the real artists and rights holders.

The brazen scheme has come to an end with Smith's conviction for his AI-powered fraud. "

The British "Guardian" pointed out that the case has also attracted public attention to the AI ​​music generation service Suno, which currently has about 2 million users.

According to the US music industry media "Billboard", Suno can generate about 7 million songs every day, which is equivalent to the size of a traditional streaming singer's complete music library every two weeks, triggering a new round of discussions in the industry on the abuse of AI music and platform supervision.