If he had been less greedy, he might have got away with it.
Smith’s scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations. In an industry where success is measured by digital listens, Smith’s fabricated catalog reportedly managed to rack up billions of streams.
AI music wasn’t really the point. It was the huge number of fake accounts and taking actions to avoid getting caught. But in our current age, you need to tie everything back to AI to get people’s attention. And I’ll admit: it worked on me, too.
Yes and no:
For example, on or about December 26, 2018, SMITH emailed two coconspirators that, “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti-fraud policies these guys are all using now.”
To obtain the necessary number of songs for his scheme to succeed, SMITH eventually turned to artificial intelligence. In or about 2018, SMITH began working with the Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company (“CC-3”) and a music promoter (“CC-4”) to create hundreds of thousands of songs using artificial intelligence that SMITH could then fraudulently stream. CC-3 soon began providing SMITH with thousands of songs each week that SMITH could upload to the Streaming Platforms and manipulate the streams for.
I’m not positive, but I may have run into this guy on Spotify. Several months ago I was listening to Spotify and was recommended two songs in a row that sounded very similar, but had very subtle differences in them. For instance, the baseline in one was slightly altered, and the main synthesisor sounded slightly different. But the overall rhythm and melody were more-or-less the same.
I was able to find 100s of versions of what were essentially the same song with a different title, artist and album art. I made a playlist of them all, but it looks like Spotify removed all but two of the songs I had added:
Obsidian Sisterhood by Aggaraway
Konnual by The Sirens
Edit: just found another one. Beasratis by Olrul
Im so glad this is what they’re spending their time investigating instead of, yknow, the massive Russian misinformation campaign being pushed to the american public by mainstream media outlets owned by right wing nut jobs.
I think there’s scope here for the FBI to be doing more than one thing.
You just wait, they’ll be all on it in a months time or two!
I see nothing wrong with this Robinhood tactic.
Sadly the big corporations don’t care at all and actually make money when people do these schemes.
They give money to artists based on proportions of overall listens. They take the same cut from the subscriptions either way. So a huge wave of fake listens basically just diverts money that otherwise would have gone directly to artists
I like to earn my listens naturally! And I’ve made…checks notes $36 in 4 years!
Check me out if you want, new track tomorrow on SoundCloud!
When real artists are getting ripped off because they don’t meet the metric to be included in the payouts, I don’t see this as Robinhood-esque.
Impressive, but seems destined to fall apart. Companies like Spotify presumably have a sense of how “normal” users listen to music. You’d have to spend a fair amount of time mimicking that or you’d get found out eventually. (As he did)
I’m going to claim he was detected by automated money laundering prevention systems when he collected the cash. Spotify learned about it from the feds, or their payment processor.
Besides that, in the indictment it says clearly that he was using the thousands of generated titles and bot accounts specifically to work around new anti-fraud systems. This is a classic cat and mouse game.