Michael Smith’s seven-year streaming operation began in 2017, prosecutors said, with purchased email addresses and fraudulently obtained debit cards used to build thousands of bogus accounts across major music services.¹ The accounts were not listeners; they were machinery for looping music Smith claimed to own.

Smith then used AI-generated tracks and software-controlled bots to create the appearance of vast, dispersed audiences on Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music. At times, the Justice Department said, as many as 10,000 accounts were streaming simultaneously. In April 2023, Smith’s music registered 80.9 million family-plan streams on YouTube Music, compared with 9.3 million for Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue, according to the government.²

The scale translated into money. Smith calculated in a 2017 email that 661,440 daily streams could yield more than $1.2 million a year; by June 2019, prosecutors said, he was drawing roughly $110,000 a month in royalties. By his 2024 arrest, the operation had generated billions of plays across hundreds of thousands of AI-made songs.²

Charged in 2024 and pleading guilty in March to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, the 54-year-old North Carolina man was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison, two years of supervised release and forfeiture of $8,091,843.64. The case was the Justice Department’s first criminal prosecution over AI-assisted streaming fraud.¹

For prosecutors, the point was not merely the platform loss but the royalty pool Smith allegedly depleted. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans,” U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said.²

Smith’s lawyer, Noell Tin, offered a sharply different emphasis: contrition and restitution. Smith was “profoundly sorry,” Tin said, and “will serve his punishment and is committed to making amends.”²