American sentenced to 18 months for inflating streams of SI music on streaming services
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
SI music fraud has now got a criminal precedent while the music itself stayed legal: what was punished was the bots.
Michael Smith of Cornelius, North Carolina, got 18 months in prison for a scheme in which he uploaded music made by neural networks to streaming services and inflated plays with bots in 2017-2024. According to Kommersant, he released thousands of tracks on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music, and the platforms paid him about $8 million for billions of fake plays. The paper calls it the first criminal prosecution in the US over SI music fraud on streaming services.