Feds Arrest Man For Raking In Millions With Fake AI Generated Music

A North Carolina man used artificial intelligence to create hundreds of thousands of fake songs by fake bands, then put them on streaming services where they were enjoyed by an audience of fake listeners, prosecutors said.

The NY Times reports penny by penny, he collected a very real $10 million, they said when they charged him with fraud.

The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven years. Smith, a flesh-and-blood musician, produced A.I.-generated music and played it billions of times using bots he had programmed, according to the indictment.

The supposed artists had names like “Callous Post,” “Calorie Screams” and “Calvinistic Dust” and produced tunes like “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zymotechnical” and “Zygophyllum” that were top performers on Amazon Music, Apple Music and Spotify, according to the charges.

“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 on Wednesday.

Smith was arrested on Wednesday and faces charges including wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for each charge.

His scheme involved a circular process, they said. First, Smith created thousands of fake streaming accounts using email addresses he had purchased online. He had as many as 10,000, even outsourcing the task to paid co-conspirators when creating the accounts became too much work.

He then created software to stream his music on loops from different computers, giving the appearance of individual listeners tuning in from different places, prosecutors said.

According to a financial breakdown that he emailed himself in 2017 — the year that prosecutors say he began the scheme — Smith calculated that he could stream his songs 661,440 times each day. At that rate, he estimated, he could bring in daily royalty payments of $3,307.20 and as much as $1.2 million in a year.

To evade detection by streaming platforms, prosecutors said, Smith spread his activity across a huge number of fake songs, never streaming a single composition too many times.