A music producer has been arrested for using AI to scam streaming royalties

Michael Cornelius of North Carolina appears to have believed that he could scoop up lot of royalties from the streaming music platforms by using hundreds of thousands of fake songs generated by AI. Those are the allegations, anyway.

Smith was arrested this week, accused of creating thousands and thousands of bot accounts on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music. Those bots where then used to automatically and continuously stream his fake AI-created songs. That worked out to 661,440 songs per day. Over the course of the scheme, songs were streamed a billion times resulting in the payment of US$10 million in royalties.

If these charges are proven in court, it was a clever scam. Smith is accused of using the bots to get around all the fraud detection systems used by streaming platforms. The plan started in 2018 and ended up using a huge number of fake email addresses and a VPN to cover where control of the bots and the email addresses resided. He allegedly uses three different digital music distributors to upload his fake songs.

There are two co-conspirators. The indictment includes this text message: “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti fraud policies these guys are all using now.

An unnamed AI music company was also involved. A services agreement was signed in 2019 that promised the company US$2,000 a month or 15% of streaming revenues, whichever was greater.

If convicted, Cornelius is looking at up to 20 years in jail.

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