Botter Sentenced To Prison In First Criminal Streaming Fraud Case, Will Return $8M In Slop Royalties

At this point, it feels like the music industry has simply adapted streaming bot-farmers into the business, but at least someone is facing some penalties for running up fake numbers. Earlier this year, the 54-year-old North Carolina singer-songwriter Mike Smith pleaded guilty for defrauding streaming services after he posted hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks and used bots to rack up billions of plays. Along the way, he raked in $8 million in royalties. It's the first criminal streaming fraud case in history, and it has now resulted in a prison sentence for Smith.In a press release, the US Justice Dept. announces that Mike Smith has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, a crime with a five-year maximum sentence. Smith was arrested in 2024, after seven years of collecting royalties based on bot streams of AI-generated songs. According to the Justice Dept., Smith's bot accounts streamed his AI-generated songs 80.9 million times, just on YouTube Music in the month of April 2023 — roughly nine times as many streams as Taylor Swift's entire catalog generated in the same month on the same platform.In addition to his prison sente...