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.
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.
I think he’s getting done for setting up the bots to listen to his own songs for billions of hours
Yea his mistake was pumping the number too much. If he would have kept a steady stream of income and not get greedy, they never would have noticed him.
The band Vulfpeck made a silent album named sleepify and asked their fans to stream it while not listening to other music. Made enough money to fund a tour. Spotify change their terms because of it i believe.
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.
So why arrested? This is what AI is for right? Oh, he screwed over the wrong people didn’t he?
it’s because his name isn’t NVidia
Or Google/Reddit/Meta.
Or screwed everyone over too little; if he had screwed everyone for 10 billion he would be heralded as a genius.
Would been on the cover of Forbes.
He didn’t get arrested for AI generated music. He got arrested for faking multiple accounts to upload music and using bots to generate fake listens, thus stealing millions of dollars. If he did the same thing with music he actually wrote and played, he would still be arrested.
Exactly. He “stole” millions from companies stealing billions, and thus was eaten.
Stealing is only wrong if you steal from rich people. It’s perfectly acceptable if the victims are poor. /s
In addition to the others that replied to you:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist
The owners made an example of the journalist that broke the Panama Papers story.
wanting to see if the killer was ever caught. Daphne Caruana Galizia Killer Caught After a thorough investigation, several individuals have been implicated and charged in connection with the assassination of Maltese journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on October 16, 2017. Key developments include:
Vincent Muscat’s Confession: In March 2021, Vincent Muscat, one of the three men accused of the murder, confessed to the crime in court. He described how he and two others, brothers George and Alfred Degiorgio, used binoculars and a telescope to follow Caruana Galizia’s movements, eventually planting and triggering the car bomb that killed her. Life Sentence Sought: In August 2021, prosecutors sought a life sentence for Yorgen Fenech, a businessman accused of masterminding the murder. Fenech has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Malta State Responsibility: An independent inquiry, concluded in July 2021, found the Maltese state responsible for Caruana Galizia’s murder due to its creation of a “culture of impunity” that allowed her killers to believe they would face minimal consequences. Arrests and Charges: Several individuals have been arrested and charged in connection with the murder, including: Vincent Muscat (pleaded guilty and received a 15-year sentence in February 2021) George Degiorgio (charged and awaiting trial) Alfred Degiorgio (charged and awaiting trial) Yorgen Fenech (charged and awaiting trial) Melvin Theuma (turned state witness and received a pardon in November 2019) Investigation Ongoing: The investigation is ongoing, with authorities continuing to gather evidence and build cases against those implicated in the murder. Timeline of Key Events
October 16, 2017: Daphne Caruana Galizia killed in a car bomb attack December 2017: Arrests of suspects, including Vincent Muscat, George Degiorgio, and Alfred Degiorgio November 2019: Melvin Theuma, a taxi driver and alleged middleman, receives a pardon and becomes a state witness March 2021: Vincent Muscat confesses to the murder in court August 2021: Prosecutors seek a life sentence for Yorgen Fenech July 2021: Independent inquiry finds Malta state responsible for Caruana Galizia’s murder Note: The investigation is ongoing, and new developments may emerge as the case proceeds.
She was a journalist who used the Panama Papers to expose high level corruption in Malta. Galizia did not break the Panama Papers story, she’s impressive enough without people making stuff up about her.
Not /s sadly.
Just look at Bernie Madoff.
The same Bernie Madoff that died in jail?
Yes. He got locked up for stealing from rich people.
Looking at you Thomas Kincade. Investments my ass.
Was anyone really stealing? The ads were served, right? The checks for the ads were paid.
The ads were served, right?
No, and that’s exactly the point that makes it a fraud (not stealing)
I hate ads but their designed to be shown to people and intentionally using bots to inflate ad views is very clearly fraud. Silicon valley had something similar with bot farms to fake user engagement to take in VC funding. You take money in exchange for some kinda engagement metric which you’re faking.
Yeah. I’m totally cool with ripping off advertising companies.
Fuck them in particular.
Ah shit. You’ve got a legal point.
I don’t think the illegal part has anything to do with the AI
This is going to be something like fraud, larceny, etc.
He was arrested because he faked a ton of information related to his accounts to make it look like many people were going it. I love that he games the system, but also it sounds like he totally committed financial fraud while doing so.
There are other people who have gamed the system without also committing fraud
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/
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.
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”.
I would like that source code for… reasons.
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.
oh look they care about it now it’s affecting then
Still better than the theory that Spotify itself is making AI jazz and putting them on their oficial playlists to not pay artists.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t buy that. I think it’s fraud. Yeah, the victims of the fraud are not nice people, but the law is supposed to protect all, not just the nice people. This isn’t “gaming the system,” it’s fraud. Uploading the AI-generated songs is fine. The problem was the fake listeners. That’s where the real fraud is.
My city has a modest bus service they contract out to a private company to operate. At the front of the buses, there are scanners that count the number of people that enter the bus. These passenger counts are then baked in to what the company is paid for their services to operate the city’s bus system.
In theory, the contractor company could park a bus somewhere, set up a conga line of people, and just have thousands of phantom passengers board a bus, and then try to bill the city based on these inflated statistics. If they did that, I would absolutely hope they would be charged with fraud.
The law isn’t stupid. There’s a reason laws are enforced by judges, not algorithms. What this person did was little different than hacking a bank account and just stealing money from it. Yes, you could say, “they didn’t do anything wrong, they’re just gaming the system!” You could just as well call guessing someone’s password and stealing their money “gaming the system.” After all, is there anything on the bank’s login page that explicitly tells you not to enter someone else’s account and transfer their money to yours? No judge in a million years would buy that.
This was effectively just a hack. This guy had to create thousands of phantom people to pretend to listen to songs. He was clearly not making any good-faith attempt at making music and was just trying to exploit a weakness in their system design to extract money from them that he didn’t earn. The law thankfully doesn’t work on a standard of “well, they never told me I couldn’t.” Cases like this take into consideration the totality of the circumstances and weigh whether it is fraud or not. And this? This wasn’t some clever technicality a legit artist used to boost their earnings. This was unambiguous fraud.
I really don’t see how this is any different from pretending to be someone else to access their bank info, conning someone out of money by pretending to be a person in need, deep-faking someone’s voice to get their relatives to send money to you, or a hundred other scams involving fake identities. Yes, the victim in this case is a villain themselves, but that doesn’t make it any less a crime.
Yes but you see the companies he defrauded are big and he is small.
Dude, the music industry was accusing the US public of theft of music worth hundreds of trillions of $$$ back in the early 2000s. They started mailing random people with $250,000 fine PER SONG PIRATED. I had a friend with like half the Amazon music library on his home computer.
They do not fucking care and yes, have lobbied every politician and AG to be in their pockets.
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>
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.
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?
Based on your numbers, ~260k plays per dollar. The person in the submission would have to get ~2600 billion plays to get $10 million.
Something doesn’t 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.
Humble brag alert
A little bit, for sure. Tempered harshly by the fact I’ve spent thousands of hours and thousands of units of cash on a hobby that paid me back $45. Good thing I don’t do it for the money!
I was just kidding. I’m very jealous. I’ve spent thousands and have nothing to show for it. Maybe a hundred bucks from live shows 20 years ago.
That’s more than $45!
I got free beer at a show once 20+ years ago, too.
The most money I ever made in the music industry was being part of a class action lawsuit against MTV. Record sales and live shows are nothing.
