A Man Just Went to Prison for $8 Million in Fake AI Streams. Your Royalty Check Helped Pay for It.
A federal judge in Manhattan sentenced Michael Smith to 18 months in prison and ordered him to forfeit $8,091,843.64 for running bots that streamed AI-generated songs billions of times between 2017 and 2024, siphoning money from the same royalty pools that pay every working musician on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music.
Elena R. · 5 min read