A version of the following article appeared in the October 12, 2026, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.
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Cornelius man sentenced to federal prison for having bots stream his AI music; bots played his songs more than Taylor Swift’s
by Tony Mecia
A Cornelius man was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week after pleading guilty to a scheme in which he collected $8M in royalties from streaming music platforms by enlisting tens of thousands of bots to stream his AI-generated music.
Michael Smith, 54, pleaded guilty in New York to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. In addition to time in federal prison, he was sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to pay $8.1M.
Prosecutors said in a statement that Smith “exploited super intelligence to generate a fraud” by “flooding music streaming platforms with automated bots” to stream his “fake songs.” It said he “robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans.”
They said that between 2017 and 2024, he created thousands of fraudulent accounts on platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music, and then used artificial intelligence to have the accounts stream songs that he created, which generated royalty payments. Prosecutors said he created “hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs for which he could manipulate the streams.”
In April 2023, Smith’s bot accounts streamed his AI music 80.9 million times – which is nearly nine times the number that Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue received that month.
The New York Times reported that Smith’s AI-generated artists had names such as “Callous Post” and “Calorie Screams” and that AI song titles included “Zygotic Washstands” and “Zymotechnical.”
The indictment said he earned as much as $110,000 a month in royalty payments by mid-2019.