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.
Penny by penny, he collected a very real US$10mil (RM43.22mil), they said when they charged him with fraud.
The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed Sept 4 of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven years. Smith, a flesh-and-blood musician, produced AI-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 US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said in a statement Sept 4.
Smith was arrested Sept 4 and faces charges including wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison for each charge.
Smith’s lawyer could not immediately be identified Wednesday. Smith could not immediately be reached at a number listed under his name in Cornelius, North Carolina, near Charlotte.
His is the first criminal case involving musical streaming manipulation brought by Williams’ office. Commercial success in the industry is increasingly measured in digital listens, despite the paltry compensation that streaming companies offer artists, who rely more and more on concert appearances to bring in money.
But modern popular music is an overwhelmingly digital affair, with artistes using computers to create beeps, bloops and beats – and to patch over the imperfections of their singing voices. Fans no longer have to possess heavy crates of vinyl or finicky cassette tapes, but receive sound in ephemeral files of ones and zeros.
Prosecutors said Smith had cut out the human element almost entirely.
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 US$3,307.20 (RM14,294.52) and as much as US$1.2mil (RM5.18mil) 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.
Smith had initially uploaded music he wrote himself to the platforms, but after determining that his catalog was too small to produce any real spoils, he tried to increase the number of songs he had access to, prosecutors said. First, he used a catalog belonging to a music publicist, and later he tried to sell his services to other musicians who would pay him to play their music or hand over a chunk of their royalties when he did. Both plans fell short, prosecutors said.
In 2018, they said, Smith teamed up with the robots.
Joining forces with the CEO of an AI music company and a music promoter, neither of whom was named in the indictment, Smith created a staggering catalogue of bogus songs, uploading thousands to streaming platforms each week.
“Keep in mind what we’re doing musically here,” Smith wrote in a 2019 email to the AI executive. “This is not ‘music,’ it’s ‘instant music’ ;).”
The compositions would arrive to Smith with file names like “n_7a2b2d74-1621- 4385-895d-ble4af78d860.mp3.” Then, he generated plausible names for the songs and their artists: “Zygopteris,” “Zygopteron,” “Zygopterous,” “Zygosporic” and so on.
In a world with real bands called Dirty Projectors, Neutral Milk Hotel and Sunn 0))), real albums like Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and real songs like MMMBop, the titles did not stand out.
By June 2019, Smith was earning about US$110,000 (RM475,446) each month, with a portion going to co-conspirators, the indictment said. In an email in February of this year, Smith bragged that he had reached 4 billion streams and US$12mil (RM51.88mil) in royalties since 2019.
Smith, prosecutors said, flatly lied to music distribution companies. In October 2018, one company informed Smith that it had received “multiple reports of streaming abuse” and that it planned to remove his songs from all stores.
Smith, the charges said, responded with a strongly worded denial:
“This is absolutely wrong and crazy!,” he said. “There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever! How can I appeal this?” – The New York Times
