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 sentence, he'll serve two years of supervised release, and he has been ordered to pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture. US Attorney Jamie McDonald says, "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. This Office is committed to ensuring the integrity of all markets, and protecting the public from those who use super intelligence for fraud."

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