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Michael Smith, 54, of Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced on October 6, 2026 to 18 months in federal prison, two years of supervised release, and ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64 in royalties fraudulently obtained through bot-driven streams of AI-generated songs.
- The scheme ran for seven years — from 2017 through 2024 — systematically draining the royalty pools of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music.
- At its peak, Smith's bot network generated as many as 661,440 fake streams per day; in April 2023 alone, his AI catalog racked up 80.9 million family-plan streams on YouTube Music — nearly nine times the 9.3 million that Taylor Swift's entire catalog produced on that same service that month.
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U.S. authorities designated the case as the first criminal prosecution in the country for artificially inflated music streaming aided by artificial intelligence, making the October 6 sentence a legal first in U.S. history.
A North Carolina man who spent seven years flooding digital music platforms with AI-produced tracks and bot-generated plays collected more than $8 million in stolen royalties before federal authorities caught up with him. On October 6, a federal judge in Manhattan handed down the sentence the music industry had been pressing for — and made legal history doing it.
