A 54-year-old man from Cornelius, North Carolina, has pleaded guilty to music streaming fraud, which earned him over $8 million in royalties through AI generated songs and bot streamers.

Michael Smith was charged by US federal prosecutors in 2024, when it was reported that his fraudulent operation began all the way back in 2017. Smith has pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison, and has also agreed to pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture.

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A press release shared via the Department of Justice website states that Smith created thousands of bot accounts across streaming platforms and used software to cause the bots to continuously stream songs that he owned. He used AI to create “hundreds of thousands” of songs for which he could manipulate the streams.

Smith spread his automated streams across thousands of songs to avoid anomalous streaming as to any single song, which would have likely caused the streaming platforms to discover his scheme, the press release also states.

A statement from U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton reads, “Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times.

“Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real. Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders. Smith’s brazen scheme is over, as he stands convicted of a federal crime for his AI-assisted fraud.”

Smith is scheduled to be sentenced in July this year.

In other AI news, Mikey Shulman, the CEO of AI music platform Suno, has reflected on his controversial statement that most people “don’t enjoy” making music.

Shulman made the comment during an interview on the 20VC podcast last year, when he claimed that most people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music because of how time consuming it is, but also because it “takes a lot of practice” and “you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software”.

Looking back on the controversy in a new interview with Billboard, Shulman admitted: “I really wish I had chosen different words.”

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