On 4th September, a 52-year-old man named Michael Smith was nabbed in the USA on charges of an extensive seven-year plot involving artificial intelligence (AI)-generated music, fictitious bands and false streams. The Department of Justice arrested the accused from North Carolina’s Charlotte. He reportedly employed AI to produce hundreds of thousands of fake songs, tricked streaming services into granting phoney plays and earned over $10 million in royalties through dishonest tactics.
He is currently being prosecuted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, each of which has a 20-year maximum penalty.
The elaborate scam
The perpetrator collaborated with two unidentified accomplices, a music promoter and the CEO of an AI music company, to produce the songs and developed an astounding collection of AI-generated music, adding thousands to streaming content every week. Investigators also obtained emails that provided insight into the inner workings of the plan. This is the first instance of musical streaming manipulation in a criminal prosecution.
The accused had virtually eliminated any human aspect. According to media reports, he had a circular process in his scheme. His initial step was to use email addresses he had bought online to create thousands of bogus streaming accounts. He had up to 10,000 fake profiles and when setting up the accounts took too much effort, he even hired others to do the work for him. He calculated that he might earn $3,307.20 per day and up to $1.2 million yearly by having his songs streamed 661,440 times a day, for a 2017 financial prediction.
Prosecutors asserted that he dispersed his activities over many faux tracks to avoid being discovered by streaming services, never playing the same song too frequently. Prosecutors stated that after realizing his repertoire was too small to yield any substantial rewards, he attempted to expand the number of songs he could access.
Initially, he had uploaded music he wrote himself to the platforms. He began by using a music publicist’s catalogue and then he attempted to charge other musicians for his services in exchange for either paying him to perform their songs or giving him a portion of their royalties in return. Prosecutors unveiled that both schemes failed. He then collaborated with the robots in 2018.
The name game
Michael Smith created many fake artists known by names such as “Callous Post,” “Calorie Screams” and “Calvinistic Dust” and created songs like “Zygotic Washstands,” “Zymotechnical” and “Zygophyllum” that were top hits on Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music. He then used his thousands of email IDs to sign in to music streaming services to stream his own music. He created software to stream his music on loops from different computers, creating the impression that different users from different places were listening to the music.
Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York revealed, “Smith stole millions in royalties that should have been paid to musicians, songwriters, and other rights holders whose songs were legitimately streamed.”
“Keep in mind what we’re doing musically here. This is not ‘music,’ it is ‘instant music’,” his 2019 email to the A.I. executive read. He would receive the compositions in file names such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621- 4385-895d-ble4af78d860.mp3.” He then came up with euphemisms for the songs and their performers including “Zygopteris,” “Zygopteron,” “Zygopterous,” “Zygosporic” and so forth. The titles didn’t stick out in a world where there are actual albums like “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” and songs like “MMMBop,” as well as real bands like Dirty Projectors, Neutral Milk Hotel, and Sunn 0))).
Similar trends also applied to the artist naming convention, where names ranged from the conventional “Calvin Mann” to obscure terms like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.” He utilised bots that stream music billions of times without any human listeners to create inauthentic streams for these tracks. Similar to other scams, the bots’ worthless streams were eventually turned into royalties for their creators.
He was making roughly $110,000 a month by June 2019, according to the accusation, with some of that money flowing to fellow conspirators. He boasted in an email sent out in February of this year that he had amassed 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019. Prosecutors disclosed that he lied outright to record labels. One firm notified him in October 2018 that it was planning to delete his tracks from all outlets due to “multiple reports of streaming abuse.”
Michael Smith denied all the charges and declared, “This is absolutely wrong and crazy. There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever! How can I appeal this,” despite the overwhelming evidence provided by the DOJ, comprising of the emails and manipulation of streaming data.
