An alleged scammer has been arrested under suspicion that he used AI to create a wild number of fake bands — and fake music to go with them — and faking untold streams with more bots to earn millions in ill-gotten revenue.
In a press release, the Department of Justice announced that investigators have arrested 52-year-old North Carolina man Michael Smith, who has been charged with a purportedly seven-year scheme that involved using his real-life music skills to make more than $10 million in royalties.
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, the Charlotte-area man faces a maximum of 20 years per charge.
Government when the elites use loopholes and do devious shit:
I sleep
Government when the peasants use loopholes:
Straight to jail
TBF, this particular loophole doesn’t take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.
And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
Yeah, this guy is in trouble because he stepped on some big toes, but he curb-stomped a bunch of little guys, too.
So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investors and share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.
Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulent scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?
It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.
But what do I know, I’m just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake on annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.
Using AI to provide services or crawlers to scan the internet for pages to add to search evinces is different from what this guy did with bots. Those use cases are not pretending to be a legit user in order to collect money.
What this guy did — using bots to fake listen to music — is in the same category as using bots to click on ads that you put on your own web page: it’s serving no legitimate purpose and only exists to defraud businesses which paid for the ads (or Spotify which is paying the royalties)…
impacts small indie artists
How?
I read the article but I don’t understand how bots making and listening to songs to generate royalties for the bot owners affects anyone but the royalty-payers?
The “royalty payers” are the streaming subsribers, and they pay the same amount regardless of how much they listen to.
The different streaming services have different payment models, but Spotify at least works by first taking their cut from subscribtion income each month.
Then, the rest is evenly distributed to the plays that month.
By inflating the playcount with bots, this guy gets a bigger share, at the expense of everyone elses plays becoming worth less.
None of the services have some infinite money glitch where more plays just means more money out of nowhere. How much you get for each play is not a fixed amount, It’s always based on how much money actually came in from subscribers, so anyone using bots to tilt the scales, is stealing from everyone else.
Agreed. As a person that has released music, I hate this guy and would like the book thrown at him and anyone mass releasing shitty AI music… It might not be a big corpo doing it, but it’s still fucking creatives over.
it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
I’m sorry but it’s the 21st century, even small indie artists can have their own sites nowadays or, heck, use bandcamp, sellaband… you can’t really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.
It’s not “complexity”.
It’s that end users have no interest in paying for individual songs.
What a smart use of the system. too bad for him.
Fyi Spotify has been doing stuff like this for years, hire dirt cheap artists, make up a fake artist/band name, upload generic jingles and implant them on every single category playlist they can. Prime example are playlists for things that don’t have too much complexity like lo-fi, calm piano, stuff like that. Disgusting. Edit: u can spot them out by digging thru some of the “artists”, and when u find one with fishy profile try looking them up on other platforms. Millions of plays on Spotify but nearly nonexistent outside of it? That’s a plant😂
I didn’t even know about this but I think you’re right. I just scrolled through the Calm Piano playlist and the third song down was by an artist with millions of streams, but absolutely zero online presence outside of Spotify and Apple Music. Their about section was just a generic sentence.
I hate this. So the idea is that the cost of creating this music is less than the payout of streaming royalties if they push the songs on their official generic playlists, effectively keeping the money in-house rather than paying to an external artist… yay…
How would that benefit Spotify if they are the ones paying the royalties to themselves? Wouldn’t that be net zero?
Take it this way, if 1 person pays 10$ a month for Spotify and gets about 50 hours of music out of it, it’s more beneficial for Spotify if a significant portion of that time is spent on music they pump into the playlists themselves, which costed them pennies to make, instead of having that user listen to real artists, that will ask for actual pay in exchange for their streams. They’re not paying a little bit to make alot, they’re paying a little bit to avoid paying even more. It’s basically average desk job employee outsourcing their work to indians who get like a dollar a day and are happy with it cus it’s their only option
Probably they find net zero (minus cost of hiring musicians) preferred over paying out a moderate income to actual artists. Capitalism at its finest.
They don’t pay equally to everyone. They benefit large artists more than smaller ones. If you only listen to your totally unknown friend’s music on Spotify, most of your money will still go to popular artists you don’t listen to, and your friend will get nothing because they’re below the threshold of getting a payment. It’s basically theft. Now if some of those popular artists are Spotify themselves behind the scenes, guess where your money is being funneled.
Isn’t that all that Facebook and Twitter is though?
So OpenAI is revolutionary but this guys a criminal? wtf?!
The main difference is who your mates are.
Sounds like they are just pissed that he found a way to beat them at their own game.
But when corporations do this, they are praised for brilliant innovative fiduciary prowess. 🙄
Am i supposed to feel sorry for poor ol’ RIAA being ripped off? 'Cos i’m not.
Every day the Butlerian Jihad looks more and more enticing.
Nothing wrong with what the man did
They’re just jealous they didn’t get a cut
The advertisers who spent 10m usd on fake “customers” disagree…
Yeah I have no sympathy for advertisers, but this seems like it’s pretty clearly fraud.
Fuck 'em
Is stealing okey just when you steal from others, or are you also okey with others stealing from you?
It’s okay when you hurt rich people and corporations
Where do we draw the line for “rich people?” You can’t just have a system where you can hurt and steal as much as you want from rich people. What you’re describing is closer to a revolution, and carrying that idea to its conclusion usually involves a ton of bloodshed and putting new people in power who are just as bad.
You’re right, because they shouldn’t exist at all. No rich people, no need to draw a line. Thanks for making this so simple!
No rich people, no need to draw a line.
If you want to deny rich people existence, you have to define what rich means, so there is pretty clear need to draw a line.
See, you cant even deliver your stupid thiefy argument correctly.
Thanks for making this so simple!
They didn’t make it simple, they just showed you that you are so simple that you can’t comprehend any kind of at least slightly complex topic.
Don’t worry about it, go back to your young communist lego or something.
