Michael Smith was sentenced on October 6, 2026, to 18 months in prison for using bots to generate streams of songs he owned and fraudulently collect music royalties. He must also serve two years of supervised release and forfeit $8,091,843.64, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.
What Smith was sentenced for
Smith pleaded guilty on March 19, 2026, to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. The plea announcement said that count carried a maximum prison term of five years; that was the statutory maximum, not the punishment he ultimately received. The court imposed an 18-month prison sentence, followed by two years of supervised release, and ordered forfeiture of $8,091,843.64. The guilty-plea announcement and the sentencing announcement report the case’s later posture and figures.
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How the AI music streaming fraud worked
According to the Justice Department, the scheme ran from 2017 through 2024. Smith created thousands of fraudulent accounts on music platforms, then used software to make those accounts continuously stream songs he owned. The songs were generally generated using AI. He spread the activity across thousands of tracks to make any one song’s stream count less likely to stand out, then claimed royalties generated by the fabricated plays. The DOJ describes these mechanics in its sentencing release.
How much money was involved?
The sentencing announcement says the bot-generated streams produced more than $8 million in royalties. The forfeiture order was for $8,091,843.64. The figures in the earlier indictment require a distinction: the 2024 charging document alleged that Smith obtained more than $10 million, while the later guilty-plea and sentencing releases reported more than $8 million and the specific forfeiture amount. The indictment’s figure was an initial allegation, not the final amount established in the later case outcome.
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| Case stage | Reported amount | What it represents |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 indictment | More than $10 million | Initial charging allegation in the federal indictment. |
| March 19, 2026 guilty plea | More than $8 million; $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture | Figures reported in the plea announcement. |
| October 6, 2026 sentence | $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture | Amount the court ordered forfeited, reported in the sentencing announcement. |
Why fake streams can affect other artists
The indictment explains that royalty pools can be allocated proportionately using streaming activity. Under the mechanism described in this case, adding artificial plays can increase one catalog’s share of a pool and leave less for songs that real listeners streamed. This is the government’s account of the royalty allocation at issue; it should not be taken to mean that every platform, rights organization, or royalty category uses an identical formula.
The scale of the streams
One comparison in the sentencing announcement illustrates the reported volume. In April 2023, Smith’s accounts generated 80.9 million streams on YouTube Music family plans. Taylor Swift’s entire catalog received 9.3 million streams from family plans on the service during that same month, according to the DOJ. These are figures from this case and that service’s family-plan category, not general measures of music listening.
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What prosecutors said
Jamie McDonald, then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said: “Michael Smith exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud.” He also said Smith “robbed millions in royalty payments from genuine artists and their fans” by replacing consumers with automated bots and creative work with fake songs. Those are McDonald’s statements in the DOJ’s sentencing release, not quotations from the court.
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