AI Music Streaming Fraudster Sentenced to 18 Months in Prison for $8M Royalties Scam
Michael Smith becomes the first person convicted of artificially inflating music streams, admitting to using bots to generate billions of fake plays.
The story so far
2 publishers have covered this in 2 articles since 6 Oct 2026. Rolling Stone published first, on 6 October at 21:48 UTC; Billboard followed 38 min later. The most recent article, from Billboard, appeared on 6 October at 22:26 UTC.
Outlets reporting it: Rolling Stone, Billboard.
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Sources
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In this story
- Michael Smith
- Mike Smith