"North Carolina musician Michael Smith was indicted for collecting over $10 million in royalty payments from Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, and YouTube Music using AI-generated songs streamed by thousands of bots in a massive streaming fraud scheme.

According to court documents, Smith fraudulently inflated music streams on digital platforms between 2017 and 2024 with the assistance of an unnamed music promoter and the Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company.

At the peak of his operation, Smith allegedly employed over 1,000 bot accounts to artificially boost streams across various platforms. On October 20, 2017, Smith emailed himself a financial breakdown outlining how he operated 52 cloud services accounts, each with 20 bot accounts, totaling 1,040 bots.

He also estimated that each account could stream approximately 636 songs per day, resulting in around 661,440 streams daily. With an average royalty rate of half a cent per stream, Smith calculated that the daily earnings would reach $3,307.20, monthly earnings of $99,216, and annual earnings exceeding $1.2 million.

By manipulating streaming data, Smith fraudulently collected more than $10 million in royalty payments after his bots streamed hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times. In a February 2024 email, he boasted that his songs generated "over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019.""