This is pretty wild...a North Carolina man just got 18 months in federal prison for running a fake music empire. He generated hundreds of thousands of AI songs, created thousands of fake listener accounts, and had bots stream his music billions of times.
The result? More than $8 million in fraudulent royalties. Here's my favorite detail, in one month, his bots generated 80.9 million streams on YouTube Music family plans. Taylor Swift's entire catalog got 9.3 million from the same category.
And he deliberately spread the streams across thousands of songs to avoid detection. The AI music wasn't the illegal part. It was the fake listeners collecting real money.
What gets me is how long this worked. The scheme ran from 2017 to 2024. If one guy could manipulate streaming numbers on this scale, I wonder how much other online activity is manufactured by bots.
How much of what we see online is actually real engagement anymore?
Wow.... I wonder how much he spend on hardware running all them bots.
Hmm good question, but with $8m coming in, I'd bet he got his money's worth...until he got caught.