Back in 2003, 50 Cent told us to “Get Rich or Die Tryin’.” Apparently, Michael Smith, a musician from North Carolina, mistakenly thought 50 said, “Get rich or lie tryin’.”
Well, that plan didn’t work out too well for him.
On October 6, Jamie McDonald, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Smith was sentenced to 18 month in federal prison for his role in a scheme to defraud music-streaming platforms and musicians out of royalty payments. Smith was also ordered to forfeit more than $8 million and serve two years of supervised release.
“Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud,” McDonald said. “By flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots in the place of consumers, and fake songs in the place of creativity, Smith robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans.”
So, what was the whole get-down?
Smith reportedly created hundreds of thousands of AI-genrated songs and thousands of fraudulent accounts, also known as “bot accounts,” which were used to continuously stream his music. Those fake streams generated royalties, allowing Smith to come up like a fat rat—until Uncle Sam came knocking.
And the numbers were ridiculous.
In April 2023, Smith’s bot accounts generated 80.9 million streams on YouTube Music through family plans. To put that into perspective, Taylor Swift’s entire catalog received 9.3 million family-plan streams on the platform during that same month.
That’s not exactly what you would call organic growth.
Smith’s operation wasn’t some overnight hustle, either. Prosecutors say the scheme ran from 2017 through 2024 with Smith using thousands of fake accounts across services including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. At its height, the operation involved thousands of bots generating billions of automated streams.
And here’s the part that makes this even crazier: prosecutors say the fraudulent streams didn’t just hurt the streaming companies. Because royalty pools are shared among rights holders, fake streams diluted the money available to legitimate artists and songwriters.
This isn’t exactly a new conversation in the Hip Hop world. Drake has also faced accusations of streaming manipulation, although those allegations have not been proven in court.
The Most High sent us a messenger through Michael Jackson, warning us to “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.”
I guess Michael Smith didn’t know when to stop.
But the Feds did.
