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.
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”.
Fuck it. This scam was clever enough that I appreciate and sorta admire it.
I thought the same, but it’s at the cost of real artists who are struggling to survive in a harsh market, so it still hurts. Sadly, this man isn’t unique. There are many Spotify listening farms listening to fake artists with AI generated songs just over 30sec which is the minimal listening requirement to get payed. And Spotify does nothing, as they get more money too.
I can appreciate a well performed scheme or crime, but only if it steals from the rich and big corps. In this case, it steals from honest artists who give us amazing music while mostly being under paid on a regular basis, with the exception here and there.
Stealing from the poor is really low. Only the biggest assholes are capable of doing that. (looks at all the billionaires)
Ah. I thought this was an isolated incident. I understand, and agree with, your point.
You don’t need those commas in that sentence. It makes you sound like Christopher Walken 😅
I’ve got a fever, and the only prescription, is more cowbell.
I think you’re confused about who got hurt by the scheme. Billion dollar streaming platforms fucking over artists don’t need to be defended.
Who’s defending the streaming platforms?
If you read my comment again, you can see I noted that Spotify is in on it. They profit too from these schemes. All those bots listening to 30sec AI songs playlists are running on Spotify premium accounts so Spotify won’t do anything to fight fraud. They take 30%.
I never defended any platform, I only defended the artists. So I guess the confused one is you, my friend.
When I first read your comment about this scheme keeping money from artists I was skeptical. But, yup! It is right there on Spotify’s website:
We distribute the net revenue from Premium subscription fees and ads to rightsholders.
Now, granted a bunch of those “rightsholders” are likely big corporate record labels but your point stands. The little guy is getting screwed, too.
Though, adding to your final thought, I bet if it was only the little guy getting screwed and not the corpos I bet DOJ wouldn’t have cared.
See this video for more info about these scams and how Spotify is enabling them and protects them.
No.
Spotify play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.
Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.
Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an “artist”.
Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays bwcoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.
Adding AI generarion into the mix is barely an innovation.
It seems like it would be super easy for them to close this loophole. If you use the model that free tier listeners (real ones) will listen to about the same distribution of songs as the paying listeners, then just stop counting all free tier listeners and multiply the amount paid out for the pay-tier listeners by an appropriate factor to make payouts the same as before.
Fuck Spotify, they can eat a bag of dicks after renewing Joe cum-guzzling Rogan for $200million. They deserve to have all of their money stolen.
Spotify is losing nothing. They take their cut either way.
The only people getting their money stolen are real artists. Their share of the income shrinks as these scammers inflate the number of plays that the money is shared between.
I didn’t realize it was a thing. Thanks for taking the time to explain!
The solution, to me, would seem to be to divide the revenue up on an individual basis instead. Does some sort of licensing issue prevent this? I’d think that the legitimate record labels would want to fix this loophole ASAP so that they can get more money.
AFAIK YT Music does this. The money from your subscription gets divided amongst whatever you listened to.
That still wouldn’t address the stolen account problem, but yes, it’d be a huge improvement.
I have no idea why Spotify still sticks to this massively exploitable model, except for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.
That’s super cool to know. Seems more fair than the way Spotify does it?
exceot for the fact that it MASSIVELY inflates their stats for investors and advertisers.
Ah yes, the Reddit strategy.
Y’know this guy seems intelligent enough to come up with this scheme, but not intelligent enough to keep a low profile. I honestly don’t understand that.
Personally, I’d do the math to pay myself a living wage with this so that my actual work salary is nothing but a cherry on top; manage it so it seems like hype is ebbing and flowing in a natural way. If you ever figure out a way to break the system like this, you should never act in a way that draws attention to yourself.
Once you have to put that amount of effort and attention in for a reasonable income… you are just doing a job… a job no-one benefits from. So it won’t be satisfying to do. No longer beating the system, just beating yourself.
It’s like the person who figured out the free gas card hack and let her friends use it. If she’d kept it herself, she’d still get free gas.
Just like in this case, it isn’t straight forward. She wasn’t simply “letting her friends use it”, she was selling use of the trick.
If you ever figure out a way to break the system like this, you should never act in a way that draws attention to yourself.
There was a guy who robbed banks and he wasn’t caught for decades because he just lived an ordinary working-class lifestyle. Cheap little apartment, no fancy car etc. etc.
I imagine quite a few folks have done this. You don’t hear about everyone that got away with it but you definitely hear about those that get caught.
Lawsuit, sure, but I’m pretty sure this isn’t illegal.
Bot listening is probably fraud.
uh, yes? it’s at the least fraud fs? the article says the doj is charging mike smith with three money laundering charges and one count of wire fraud. obviously the wire fraud charge comes from an argument that smith defrauded the distribution companies into illegitimately paying out royalties for false streams. note that the artificial intelligence solution only comes into the argument for the purposes of how he committed the crime, it really had nothing to do with the crime itself, at least intrinsically. if you read the press release from the doj, you can see that they make a pretty airtight argument that, quote:
SMITH made numerous misrepresentations to the Streaming Platforms in furtherance of the fraud scheme. For example, SMITH repeatedly lied to the Streaming Platforms when he used false names and other information to create the Bot Accounts and when he agreed to abide by terms and conditions that prohibited streaming manipulation. SMITH also deceived the Streaming Platforms by making it appear as if legitimate users were in control of the Bot Accounts and streaming music when, in fact, the Bot Accounts were hard coded to stream SMITH’s music billions of times. SMITH also caused the Streaming Platforms to falsely report billions of streams of his music, even though SMITH knew that those streams were in fact caused by the Bot Accounts rather than real human listeners.
SMITH’s hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs were streamed by his Bot Accounts billions of times, which allowed him to fraudulently obtain more than $10 million in royalties.
it is not illegal to lie. it is absolutely illegal to lie for the purposes of financial gain. sure, i’m not disagreeing that what he did could not somehow be construed as something of a robin hood character arc (even tho he most certainly did this for the purposes of his own personal enrichment). but he almost definitely is guilty of the wire fraud charge and i do have a strong feeling, based on the prosecutorial level of this case, the involvement of a specialized division of the fbi, and his purported co-conspirators; that the money laundering charges are ironclad as well. frankly, i’m hoping his co-conspirators actually do end up going to trial and we get to learn what the company that aided in his fraud actually was. on fucking god it’d be one thing if he ran this grift machine for a little while, paid off a lil bit of his debts and all, maybe even lived off of it. but to steal $10 million fucking dollars with it, even when he knew he was committing fraud and had to explicitly hide his criminal activity??? no shit the fbi was hot on your trail. what an absolutely, colossal dipshit michael smith must be. i respect the ingenuity but it is so blindingly obvious that 10 million dollars was egregiously too many times to press a “free money button” you just invented in a capitalist autocratic hellscape.
QUICK EDIT: i do just wanna say also i did not downvote u/shani66 and i just wanted to contribute to discussion. just noticed after i posted someone had downvoted them which is kinda goofy of whoever that is.
Just wanted to add something. Lying for Financial gain isn’t illegal it’s how you do it. Like people lie for Financial gain all the time.
that’s fair, my absolute statement doesn’t reflect the exclusive way anti fraud laws are written. you certainly might find and successfully exploit legal ways to lie for financial gain, but at best it’s unethical and at worst you’ll have to defend why your deceit isn’t criminal fraud in a lawsuit. it kind of depends on who you piss off the most, imo.
According to the article, they’re going for multiple counts of money laundering and wire fraud with 20 years each.
Probably against the TOS, though, meaning the money paid was never owed, could get it into fraud
That’s still civil. I think this is just a case of fraud plain and simple.
People who are not part of the wealthy elite stealing profits is illegal. Doesn’t matter what the method was.
This is the truth. He would have been fine if he was super rich
And yet Xitter, Farcebook and similar platforms still publish their stats as if all their users are real human beings. So why isn’t that fraud?
People who are
notpart of the wealthy elite stealing profits isillegal.Plausible deniability is the answer.
Because it’s only fraud if a normal person makes money from it, duh 🤪
This is what Spotify was made for so I dont really see the issue. He made the music and the listeners, just look at that engagement you love so much!
Imagine something like a DDOS attack. But it’s fans throwing AI listeners behind artists they love to boost them.
Imagine if fans shaped the music industry instead of the other way around?
Now you’re playing with power
I firmly believe that VR won’t have fully developed until we have power gloves that work like they did in those commercials.
People would very quickly figure out all the adverts being streamed to those accounts weren’t translating into sales, and they’d know something was amiss.
How do you prove that your ad campaign is working?
That’s the neat part- you don’t!
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/does-advertising-actually-work-part-2-digital-ep-441/
So it’s OK if you are a real artist?
I think the Botting of streams to game the royalties is the bit they don’t like.
Obviously it would be a beach of t&cs
I’ve never heard of someone being arrested for breaching ToS though. They could be sued for breach of contract, but that’s it. So far the only thing I could think of is if the bots were illegally acquired by hacking devices or something. There’s nothing illegal about paying for a server and having it download free Spotify streams.
There’s nothing illegal about downloading streams, but if the purpose of your downloads is to get fraudulent royalties, then of course it’s illegal as wire fraud under 18 U.S.C. § 1343.
I would like that source code for… reasons.
A headline that wouldn’t have been possible five years ago. Sick.
Aside from “ai” it was just as possible 5 years ago. There have been algorithmic random music generators around for at least a decade, and click bots have been around since at least the 90s
Of course it would have been possible. It would have been possible even like 100 years ago because we had the same alphabet and newspapers and headlines were a thing.
Calorie event?! Why not just call it a doughnut.
The butlerian jihad is missing the point here.
The fraud is using bots (not AI just plain python with selenium or something like that. Sorry) for making fake listeners.
AI here is just some coat to hide the fraud a little better, but nothing more.
Do they insert advertisements?
If so then the real fraud is false viewings of advertisements.
Which upsets the advertisers of course.
^
Futurama had it right, spammers are the ultimate destroyers.
Can you imagine how exciting it would be though when this actually started to work? This probably started as a side project, with a dude saying like, nahhh this could never work.
Until suddenly it did
<play rock guitar riff>
bro found a glitch in the system
i mean this is the system we got set up isnt it?
He found a flaw in the system and exploited it. Although he didn’t do anything particularly wrong, the tools he used allowed him to do it. Yet, somehow he has to pay the consequences and the companies that made the tools to exploit the system are not liable. Got it.
What.
If he used python for creating the bots, should python creators go to jail?
I mean I also agree that this seems like it shouldn’t be illegal, but as per what you’re saying, obviously people can use python for malicious intent, what do you mean?
I mean that creators of a tool shouldn’t be liable for a crime committed with that tool. Unless the tool was purposely made for doing crimes.
Oh my bad I should’ve read more context
Nah he is saying the streaming services should fix their flaw / the guy shouldn’t have consequences for what he did, as it was all inputted in a legal way it seems.
Yeah but he is messing with rich people’s money and that is a #1 no no. If he was scamming poor people no one would have cared.
I mean hopefully they’ll drop the case, and fix the underlying issues to ensure the artists get paid, and the scams don’t continue. The world isn’t that nice though is it.
That’s the outcome that seems most logical. I want to see real artists get paid for creating real music. The current system is too prohibitive and unrewarding.
If an artist spends hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars creating their work, only to see a return of maybe a few dollars that’s a big problem.
If someone can use AI to game that same system for millions of dollars by creating loads of fake music in a fraction of the time; that’s a symptom of the big problem.
The current system of streaming just isn’t beneficial to artists. I imagine it’s not great for movies either. Yet, these companies are taking in HUGE profits. It was only a matter of time before someone tried to take advantage of a loophole.
If you think about it, it’s kind of like reverse piracy.
This is what fucked Bernie Madoff.
If this person had gone to VC’s with a pitch for ‘AI listening model’ with the explanation that “Now musicians can up load their songs to streaming services and AI will listen to make sure their pitch and tonality is accurate and that the beat is correct.” or some bullshit like that. Then it would have been ‘legal’
That would be a completely different piece of software. It didn’t check their pitch or their tonality or their beat. It was barely an AI.
All it did was listened to the music.
So yes if he had written a completely different piece of software that did something completely different he could have pitched it completely differently and the outcome could have been completely different.
Exactly. The flaw is in the streaming service. They say “upload your music and make money” while skimming the lions share of the profits. But if they use tools that are openly available to all, i.e. generative AI (which uses copyrighted works for it generational algorithms) AND the Streaming service systems themselves, somehow this user is at fault because they don’t like the way he did it and the amount he uploaded. It seems to me it’s a problem with the system and not the user.
I think you’re missing the key part of the problem. It isn’t the AI that’s the issue.
The problem is that he was being paid for how many listeners his AI songs got. But he used bots to “listen” to the songs. Nobody actually listened to his AI music.
The flaw in the system was that they couldn’t detect his bots. (And the bots are not AI)
America’s darling Jeff Bezos exploited a flaw in his book suppliers policies to gain an unfair edge on competitors in the early days of Amazon. Best business man ever: give him the key to the city and a dick-shaped rocket ship.
He also got rich daddy and rich friend money to get money for his totally original and non-derivative idea of “selling things online”. Maybe that’s where this guy went wrong? No rich daddy?
They wouldn’t be real capitalists (and boomers) if they didn’t pull the ladder up behind them.
The “selling things online” idea had been tried repeatedly before Amazon, and always failed. What Bezos did was find a way to actually (eventually) make money at it. That was a business strategy tour de force that was quite impressively executed. That’s not to say that Bezos is a good employer or a nice person. But it’s often the case that it’s not the originality of the idea that matters, as much as how it’s executed.
This is hard to verify on Google. What did he do?
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.
