60 years in prison for cheating Spotify and others?
A US musician is facing up to 60 years in prison for running a scheme to swindle huge amounts of money from streaming services such as Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music.
Over a period of years, he created hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs which were then promoted using bots. His pay-off? More than $10 million in royalties.
Streaming services pay notoriously low figures for streaming music. So the musician, Michael Smith, decided to create a vast network of fake IDs and e-mail addresses to stream his own music. At the height of his fraudulent scheme, Smith used over a thousand bot accounts simultaneously to artificially boost streams of his music across the streaming platforms. “By manipulating the streaming data in this manner, Smith fraudulently obtained more than $10 million in royalty payments to which he was not entitled,” according to the indictment.
Less money for musicians and their labels
Schemes to defraud streaming services have more than one victim. As streaming payouts are based on a fixed amount, fraudulent plays reduce the amount of money going to bona-fide musicians and their labels. The services have conditions that ban, “artificially increasing play counts or follow counts, artificially promoting Content, or other manipulation including by (i) using any bot, script, or other automated process."
In the US, this constitutes wire fraud. Smith reportedly risks up to 60 years in prison.
(ML/Source: PCMag/ Picture: © Pixabay)