Michael Smith, the North Carolina man at the center of the first US criminal prosecution for AI-assisted music streaming fraud, was sentenced Tuesday to 18 months in prison. U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl imposed the sentence in the Southern District of New York, according to the Justice Department. Smith, 54, pleaded guilty on March 19 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He also received two years of supervised release and must forfeit $8,091,843.64.
Prosecutors said the scheme ran from 2017 to 2024. Smith used as many as 10,000 bot accounts at once to stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times on Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, spreading plays across thousands of tracks to avoid triggering fraud detection. In April 2023, the DOJ said, his bot accounts streamed his AI-generated music 80.9 million times through YouTube Music family plans, while Taylor Swift’s entire catalog received 9.3 million streams through family plans that month.
“By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans,” U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said.
The sentence is far below what prosecutors reportedly wanted. They sought at least 46 months, within a guidelines range of 46 to 57 months, against a legal maximum of 60.