In the first case of its kind in the country, a Charlotte-area man is charged with using AI to manipulate music streaming platforms to siphon off over $10 million in royalties, federal authorities said Wednesday. Michael Smith, 52, of Cornelius, was arrested Wednesday and is charged with wire fraud conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said in a news release. Each charge carries up to 20 years in prison if convicted. Smith’s complex scheme used automated programs, or “bots,” to stream songs created with artificial intelligence, according to an indictment released Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney’s office and the FBI’s New York Field Office. He then used the bot accounts to stream those songs billions of times across multiple streaming platforms to boost his royalties to over $10 million, according to the indictment. “Through his brazen fraud scheme, Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed,” Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement.

Praying for Dave Free 🙏

How you get $10M in royalties from 600k streams??

Nevermind I see "billions of times" in the post now lol

Doot actually made a funny post

Nobody talk to me

This is the worst day ever

he was doing 600,000 streams a day

damn

that liar AK had on his stream said u cant bot apple music tho

he did nothing wrong

TDE about to get hit next

take down bbygirl next

this is why idg the infatuation with streaming numbers

they don’t mean s*** if they can get manipulated like this + you can stream well and have no one support your music or pop out to a show

s***s worthless

How is this even considered fraud lol

If they had trav's label backing this would just be business as usual

Somebody hire him

What law did he brake?

sht dont hate the player hate the game

GloRilla is now the most recent victim of this kind of theft. Someone on Spotify named "SkitzU" uploaded her song, "Yeah Glo!" to streaming and that "version" is what's going viral. But she isn't the only one.
SkitzU has also stolen music from Jhonni Blaze (her song "Ratchet"), Apollo G (his song "Si K Sta"), and BbyAfricka (her song "Mango Sticky Rice"). SkitzU also uses A.I. generated artwork for their "releases." The original artists are credited on each release, but if you click on their name it'll just bring you to a dead account with the same profile picture as SkitzU. This is done to hide unassuming TikTok users from the reality that they are listening to stolen material, yet SkitzU doesn't even bother editing the song to make it a little bit different, it's just a direct lift of the original track.
You may not like any of these artists, but that doesn't mean they deserve to have their original music stolen from them.

The music industry gon do him like they did Epstein

Free him

only the labels are allowed to game the system

This is literally the law

The FTC is about to bury this guy.