Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots
Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots
An alleged scammer has been arrested under suspicion that he used AI to create a wild number of fake bands — and fake streams to with them.
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.
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.
oh look they care about it now it's affecting them
Honestly, what did he do wrong? He made crappy cheap music and listened to it using AI and bots. listening to it must have cost him subscription money, so I guess he just listened enough to get the songs popular enough so that other would listen, and they did and everyone made money.
Yeah, it's all cheap shit but it's wrong when he does it but totally fine when so many other media companies do it?
i mean this is the system we got set up isnt it?
Maybe he broke terms of service with the streaming companies but they should be pursuing him in civil courts. This feels like abuse of the criminal justice system to retrieve money for companies that were negligent in how they were running their streaming businesses.
This guy produced music and he alsp streamed the music even if it was bots at industrial scale. He seemingly met the criteria needed to get money from the streamers. I'm not a lawyer at all but on cursory look at the definition and elements of wire fraud, I guessing this will hinge on whether this was a "material deception" - but he produced actual music and he streamed it, so is it?
Also i wonder whether it can be proven that the intent was to "defraud" rather than take advantage / game a system.
It feels like the tax payer is bearing the cost of prosecuting someone for a dispute between a person and the multi billion dollar music industry.
Also the music industry trying to paint this as theft of money from other artists is a bullshit - the streaming fees are supposedly divided out proportionately from overall streaming. He caused more streaming so the pot was bigger, and he took a proportionate share of that bigger pot. And any disproportionate sharing reflects the shitty practice's of the streamers and the big music rights holders who are essentially monopolies squeezing out the smaller competitors from the system.
If your business model allows somebody to game you like that, you kind of deserve it tbh.
It shouldn't be based on plays. It should be based on money made from a customer and divided between what they listened to/watched. But then you wouldn't make as much money from the people that forget to use their subscriptions, which is probably a huge chunk of their revenue.
bro found a glitch in the system
Its subtle, but the tone of that article's coverage actually sucks... Is futurism a piece of shit?
What a waste of my tax dollars by the DOJ to try to recover spotify´s money for a broken system that they left open and are honestly probably exploiting themselves in parallel to inflate engagement numbers and take streams away from legit artists that they have to play. Remember, they want you in their app, they don't give a shit about actual music. If you'll just listen to random boops, they save cost in the middle. Not where I want the justice systems effort to go.
Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud
Oops. Picked on the big dogs by playing their own game.
Seriously though, probably more going on than what we read here.
I thought about experimenting with this (Guess it is a good thing I didn't). There are so many low effort "Lo Fi" types of streams and tracklists on Spotify and elsewhere. Who is to say my software generated garbage would be any worse than those?
There are also YouTubers who generate low effort music and ask their normal content subscribers to stream their shit on Spotify even if they aren't legitimately listening. So are those streams fraudulent as well?
It sounds like the thing he is getting popped for is the volume of automated streams.
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?
Free him
to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”
As a fan of the Osees, those sound perfectly normal.
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.
If he had been using the streams to train new AI bands, then that's just using resources to develop a product.
"What are you in for?"
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.
Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
And he thought he could get away with it without bribing the politicians!
This is the craziest fucking timeline.
It goes to show streaming services are not long for this world with the introduction of AI.
I would like that source code for… reasons.
gottem
there needs to be a law that in order to sell something in a store a real person needs to examine it.