Man who streamed AI songs with bots for $8 million gets 18 months in prison

Michael Smith, 54, from Cornelius, North Carolina, stood before Judge John G. Koeltl in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday, October 6. The judge gave him 18 months in prison, followed by two years of supervised release.

Smith had already agreed to forfeit $8,091,843.64 as part of his plea deal. He pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

Rolling Stone, which was in the courtroom, says Smith nodded heavily as the sentence was read. Asked if he wanted to say anything afterward, he told the judge: "Thank you for your consideration on everything, Your Honor."

It is the first criminal case in the United States over artificially inflated music streams, and now it has its first prison sentence.

The two sides were far apart, and the judge landed in between.

• Charge maximum: 5 years in prison.
• Federal guidelines: 46 to 57 months.
• Prosecutors asked for: at least 46 months.
• US Probation Office recommended: 24 months.
• Smith's lawyers asked for: probation, no prison at all.
• The sentence: 18 months.

The big picture: when Smith was first charged in September 2024, he faced three counts carrying 60 years between them, Music Business Worldwide reports. The guilty plea to a single count replaced all of that.

The idea was simple. The execution took years.

Smith created thousands of streaming accounts, often under fake names, and paid for them with corporate debit cards. Software then made those accounts play songs nonstop, as if real people were listening. Every play earned royalties.

According to Billboard, prosecutors say he started by boosting plays of his own music. Then he switched to AI-generated songs in bulk, because the bots needed far more music than one person could write. Music Business Worldwide reports he worked with the head of an AI music company and a music promoter, neither named in the filings.

The platforms named in the case:

• Spotify
• Apple Music
• Amazon Music
• YouTube Music

Prosecutors say he had as many as 10,000 bot accounts running at certain points.

Smith kept notes, and prosecutors put them in court filings. Music Business Worldwide walked through them.

Early on, he emailed himself a plan:

• Cloud accounts: 52, each running 20 bot accounts.
• Bot accounts: 1,040 in total.
• Plays per bot: about 636 songs a day.
• Daily streams: about 661,440.
• Projected royalties: about $3,307 a day, or $1,207,128 a year, at an assumed half a cent per stream.

By June 2019, he reported "88 million TOTAL STREAMS so far" and earnings of about $110,000 a month.

He also knew where the danger was. In an October 2018 email he wrote that "we need a TON of content with small amounts of Streams" to avoid raising issues. In May 2019: "If we get too many streams on one song it comes down."

In real life Imagine a tip jar shared by every musician in town, split by how many people clapped for each one. Smith hired thousands of robots to clap very quietly for songs nobody wrote, spread out so no single performer looked suspicious.

By the numbers: in April 2023, Smith's catalog drew 80.9 million streams from YouTube Music family-plan accounts, Digital Music News reports. Taylor Swift's entire catalog drew 9.3 million from the same group that month.

This was the heart of the fight over the sentence.

Big streaming services don't pay a fixed price per play. They set aside a share of their revenue as a pool, then split it by each track's share of all plays that month. If your song gets 1% of the plays, it gets 1% of the money.

Why it matters: a fake stream doesn't cost Spotify anything extra. It shrinks the slice that goes to every real stream. Music Business Worldwide calls it dilution rather than theft from the service.

Smith took in more than $14 million from royalty payers in total. The agreed loss of about $8.09 million is what remains after subtracting his real royalties and the money he spent buying streaming accounts. Spotify's portion was about $60,000.

What finally tripped him up was the other pipe of royalties. Songwriting money for US digital plays flows through The Mechanical Licensing Collective, which flagged the irregularities and held back payments, Music Business Worldwide reports. Prosecutors say Smith lied to distributors and to the MLC about his songs.

Smith's lawyers said the harm to any single artist was tiny. "The effect each individual stream of one artist's song has on every other artist's share of total streams is not akin to a drop in a proverbial bucket, it is a drop in an ocean," they wrote, according to Billboard.

In court, his lawyer Justine Harris pointed out that when Smith started, many platforms did not ban bots in their terms of service. She argued that the arrest had already sent a message, and that only structural changes to streaming would stop this kind of fraud, Rolling Stone reports.

Prosecutors disagreed. Assistant US Attorneys Nicholas W. Chiuchiolo and Kevin B. Mead wrote that "a lenient sentence will send precisely the wrong message: streaming fraud will not result in meaningful punishment."

In court, Chiuchiolo said small royalty checks still matter to songwriters and are sometimes the only recognition they get for their work.

Smith spoke too. Choking up at times, the father of six said he had wanted to be a good husband, father and musician. "I betrayed the music community I care so much about," he told the court. "I have made a mess of what was an honorable life."

After the hearing, Manhattan federal prosecutor Jamie McDonald said Smith had "exploited" new technology. "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," McDonald said in a statement quoted by Billboard.

When Smith pleaded guilty in March, US Attorney Jay Clayton put it this way: "Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real."

The Recording Industry Association of America said the court recognized "the significance of this harmful conduct." The Music Fights Fraud Alliance, an industry group formed in 2023, welcomed the sentence but said it will take "more than one case" to stop streaming fraud.

What's next: Smith will serve his sentence and then two years of supervised release. The case was first announced by the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York in September 2024.

• If you make music: fake plays shrink the shared pool your royalties come from, so platforms and collection groups are watching for unusual patterns more closely.
• If you use AI music tools: making songs with AI was not the crime here. Faking the listeners and lying about it was.
• If you just listen: your subscription to services like Apple Music or Spotify feeds that same shared pool, so fake plays decide where part of your money goes.