The songs that the AI CEO provided to Smith originally had file names full of randomized numbers and letters such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621-4385-895d-b1e4af78d860.mp3,” the DOJ noted in its detailed press release.
When uploading them to streaming platforms, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the man would then change the songs’ names to words like “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” and “Zyme Bedewing,” whatever that is.
The artist naming convention also followed a somewhat similar pattern, with names ranging from the normal-sounding “Calvin Mann” to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
To manufacture streams for these fake songs, Smith allegedly used bots that stream the songs billions of times without any real person listening. As with similar schemes, the bots’ meaningless streams were ultimately converted to royalty paychecks for the people behind them.
Based
As fuck. Use the system they built against them. All day.
Indeed, this is what we called “Okay, now that you’re using the loophole against us instead of the other way around… We don’t like it anymore.”
Nooo that’s ours to exploit stop ittt 😤
Still better than the theory that Spotify itself is making AI jazz and putting them on their oficial playlists to not pay artists.
I don’t see how this is money laundering or wire fraud. I hope he gets off. Or the real best solution would to make it so the revenue just goes to the artists the AI is ripping off.
oh look they care about it now it’s affecting then
I would like that source code for… reasons.
Unfortunate that he got caught. He was simply playing the same game the corps do but since he isn’t mega rich he gets punished.
Finally a use case for AI.
Spotify might as well be doing this themselves already to avoid having to pay all those annoying artist
Yeah, a streaming service with the hit songs like “Zyme Bedewing” from everyone’s favorite artist “Calorie Event”.
Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
Gonna miss having Zyme Bedewing on my Playlist.
I’m weirdly creeped out about how this article refers to him as “the man”. Was this written by an AI?
bro found a glitch in the system
Wow. I’m a hobbyist musician. I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services and have made a whopping $45 in the two years since I finally released ~25 years worth of material. (Which is a lot of why it’s my hobby and not a living.)
I can’t imagine the numbers this guy had to pull off to make that much.
Based on your numbers, ~260k plays per dollar. The person in the submission would have to get ~2600 billions plays to get $10 million.
Something does seem right with those numbers.
There are people on forums doing the same thing as the person in the submission. 1 person with ~30 phones can generate about 15-20k streams in a day doing it manually.
Maybe some kind of increasing scale for revenue depending on larger numbers of listens.
My break down by track is pretty inconsistent, too. I’ve got a single track with over a million listen that made me 36 cents. My most popular track has over 4M listens, and it’s responsible for half that $45. Distrokid doesn’t say which streaming service that revenue comes from, either. Some pay more than others, I imagine.
Do you pay them any money to have the songs on the platforms?
If not, I wonder if they charge you a fee but only deduct their fee from your earnings. So if you don’t get plays then they don’t ask for money. And the break even point is at around 1 million plays. Just a theory of course; I’m sure it’s all stated in the fine print.
I pay Distrokid ~$20 a year to distribute my music to a lot of streaming services, but I do not pay individual streaming services. I never really expected much return. I wasn’t disappointed! Haha!
I was just curious about why 4 million plays is ~$20 and 1 million plays is less than a dollar.
Send me a link and I can get you to ~12 million and 1 listens.
Searching my username should do it. Not sure what streaming services you’re subscribed to. It’s all on YouTube, too.
How obvious is it that it’s a bot?
Me? Honestly, I think it would be obvious to any discerning listener what music is actually made by a person, and what music is AI generated, but really, there’s so much music out there of wildly varying quality thanks to accessibility of production tools these days, it probably is literally impossible to tell the difference anymore.
I think it would be obvious to any discerning listener what music is actually made by a person
I’m not so sure anymore. Udio’s output is more obvious but Suno has gotten scarily good. I’ll still always crave the human element though and I make my music for myself.
I have ~12 million listens across various streaming services
The great thing about bots is that they can listen to every song on file, 24/7/365, and you can spin up as many of them as you like. 12 million is nothing.
I have to wonder about the logistics. He can’t be running them on his own single Internet connection. Or could VPNs handle it so it would appear his listens are coming from all over the world? $10M is a lot of money. How long did it take to amass that?
Honestly I don’t think this should be a crime.
No.
By inflating his own playcounts, the value of each play goes down. All that money he got? Came straight out of the pockets of real artists.
The guy sounds like a great entrepreneur.
If he already had millions in the bank the lawyers would have made this go away before anyone in the public would have noticed.
SMITH created thousands of accounts on the Streaming Platforms (the “Bot Accounts”) that he could use to stream songs. He then used software to cause the Bot Accounts to continuously stream songs that he owned. At a certain point in the charged time period, SMITH estimated that he could use the Bot Accounts to generate approximately 661,440 streams per day, yielding annual royalties of $1,207,128.
From the original press release: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-musician-charged-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence
Kinda funny how the term “AI” drowns out all rational thought and reading comprehension. Of course, that’s why it’s there in the clickbait headline. I avoid news sources that pull that sort of thing. I don’t appreciate being manipulated.
Free him
