A North Carolina man was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence and automated bot accounts to defraud music streaming platforms and generate millions of dollars in fraudulent royalty payments. Michael Smith, 54, from Cornelius, N.C., was also ordered to forfeit over $8 million in royalties, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York announced Tuesday.

Smith pleaded guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, admitting to orchestrating a scheme that artificially inflated streaming numbers on services including Amazon Music, Apple Music, and Spotify. The sentence includes two years of supervised release following imprisonment.

Prosecutors described Smith’s operation as the first case brought by the Justice Department involving fraud facilitated by artificial intelligence in the music industry. Starting in 2017, Smith obtained thousands of email addresses to create bot accounts across multiple streaming platforms. He then used artificial intelligence to generate original music under fictitious artist names such as Callous Post and Calorie Screams. The AI-created tracks—titles included "Zygotic Washstands" and "Zymotechincal"—were streamed on continuous loops by the bots, simulating real listeners from various locations.

At the scheme’s height, Smith’s network employed up to 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously, collectively generating billions of streams through 2024. The Justice Department highlighted that in April 2023 alone, Smith’s accounts used family subscription plans to stream his songs more than 80 million times. In contrast, they noted, Taylor Swift’s entire catalog received 9.3 million streams that month on YouTube Music from family plan users.

Evidence submitted in the case included a financial analysis Smith had prepared in 2017, estimating that by streaming his songs 661,440 times daily, he could earn approximately $3,300 in daily royalties—totaling over $1.2 million annually. By mid-2019, Smith was reportedly earning about $110,000 monthly, with some payments shared among co-conspirators. Communications seized by prosecutors indicated that by 2024, Smith boasted of reaching four billion streams and collecting $12 million in royalties since 2019.

Jamie McDonald, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, condemned the fraud, stating that Smith’s actions “robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans.” Smith’s defense attorney, Noell Tin, expressed that Smith was “profoundly sorry” and committed to accepting responsibility and making amends.