He used AI to create songs and bots to stream them. It earned him $8M and jail time
A North Carolina man has pleaded guilty to defrauding music streaming platforms out of $8 million in royalties by uploading artificial intelligence (AI) generated songs and using bots to increase the number of streams.
Michael Smith, 52, pleaded guilty on March 20th, 2026, for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison.
Smith used AI to create hundreds of thousands of songs and used automated programs, or bots, to fraudulently stream his AI-generated songs billions of times.
Smith spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming for any single song, preventing streaming platforms from discovering his scheme.
By streaming these songs billions of times, Smith fraudulently obtained more than $8 million in royalties.
“Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole were real. Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders,” US Attorney Jay Clayton said in a statement.
Each time a song is streamed on platforms like Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the songwriter, musician, or other rights holders are entitled to a small royalty payment.
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The platforms have been struggling to contain the flood of AI-generated songs since generative AI became widely accessible in late 2022.
Spotify, the world’s largest streaming platform, removed over 75 million spammy tracks in 2025.
In addition, the service announced new measures to tackle AI-generated music, including enhanced enforcement of impersonation violations, a new spam-filtering system, and AI disclosure for AI-generated music.
Last year, French streaming platform Deezer announced that over one in four (28%) of the songs uploaded to its platform are fully AI-generated.
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