Urgent-care owner gets 18 months in $8M AI music scam

Michael Smith, a 54-year-old urgent-care owner from Cornelius, North Carolina, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $8,091,843.64 after pleading guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Prosecutors said he pulled more than $10 million in streaming royalties out of Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music between 2017 and 2024 by generating hundreds of thousands of songs with AI and pointing bot networks at them on loop.

On The Vergecast, Wired's Kate Knibbs walked hosts David Pierce and Nilay Patel through the mechanics. Smith used an early AI music generator called Boommy, well before Suno and Udio, and uploaded the tracks under invented artist names like Calm Baseball and Calliope Bloom. Almost none of that was illegal on its own. "It's fully permitted to put AI music on these platforms," Knibbs said. "The thing that he did that was a crime wasn't putting all the AI songs on these platforms."

The crime was the lying. When distribution companies and streamers asked Smith directly whether he was inflating streams, he said no, and that is the thread federal prosecutors pulled on.

Detection was uneven. Spotify caught Smith almost immediately and only lost tens of thousands of dollars; the other services kept paying out for years.

U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton put the headline on the case: "Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times. Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real." Knibbs told the hosts that dozens of more sophisticated operators are still running similar schemes, particularly from Cambodia and other jurisdictions where crypto payouts make them hard to touch.