11mo ago

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 music to go with them — and faking untold streams with more bots to earn millions in ill-gotten revenue.

In a press release, the Department of Justice announced that investigators have arrested 52-year-old North Carolina man Michael Smith, who has been charged with a purportedly seven-year scheme that involved using his real-life music skills to make more than $10 million in royalties.

Indicted on three counts involving money laundering and wire fraud, the Charlotte-area man faces a maximum of 20 years per charge.

News @lemmy.world

TokenBoomer @lemmy.world

11mo ago

Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots

futurism.com /man-arrested-fake-bands-streams-ai

Technology @lemmy.world

ByteOnBikes @slrpnk.net

11mo ago

Man Arrested for Creating Fake Bands With AI, Then Making $10 Million by Listening to Their Songs With Bots

futurism.com /man-arrested-fake-bands-streams-ai

44 comments

Government when the elites use loopholes and do devious shit:
I sleep
Government when the peasants use loopholes:
Straight to jail
- TBF, this particular loophole doesn't take any money from the streaming services. Quite the opposite, it massively inflates their stats.
  And while it does siphon money from the big labels, it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
  Yeah, this guy is in trouble because he stepped on some big toes, but he curb-stomped a bunch of little guys, too.
  
  So corporations use ai and bots themselves in order to inflate their stats and steal money from investors and share holders(see Reddit) and its all cool. Someone does that but it costs the corporation some money. Straight to jail.
  Seriously, how has the reddit IPO which was offered to users not been a fraudulent scheme due to the website statistics being based on genuine user interaction with no mention of auto reposting or bots that are either operated by or hired by reddit?
  It genuinely seems like the next ponzi scheme but that would require so many federal agencies that stopped giving shit and learning how the world works to see any peep into that business.
  But what do I know, I'm just some average Joe that gets audited over a $300 mistake on annual taxs which I have to pay a private third party more than that to do.
  
  Agreed. As a person that has released music, I hate this guy and would like the book thrown at him and anyone mass releasing shitty AI music.. It might not be a big corpo doing it, but it's still fucking creatives over.
  
  impacts small indie artists
  How?
  I read the article but I don't understand how bots making and listening to songs to generate royalties for the bot owners affects anyone but the royalty-payers?
  
  it also impacts small indie artists just trying to earn enough from each play to get to eat.
  I'm sorry but it's the 21st century, even small indie artists can have their own sites nowadays or, heck, use bandcamp, sellaband... you can't really use technological complexity as an excuse to depend on fat middlemen.
Fyi Spotify has been doing stuff like this for years, hire dirt cheap artists, make up a fake artist/band name, upload generic jingles and implant them on every single category playlist they can. Prime example are playlists for things that don't have too much complexity like lo-fi, calm piano, stuff like that. Disgusting. Edit: u can spot them out by digging thru some of the "artists", and when u find one with fishy profile try looking them up on other platforms. Millions of plays on Spotify but nearly nonexistent outside of it? That's a plant😂
- I didn't even know about this but I think you're right. I just scrolled through the Calm Piano playlist and the third song down was by an artist with millions of streams, but absolutely zero online presence outside of Spotify and Apple Music. Their about section was just a generic sentence.
  I hate this. So the idea is that the cost of creating this music is less than the payout of streaming royalties if they push the songs on their official generic playlists, effectively keeping the money in-house rather than paying to an external artist.. yay..
- How would that benefit Spotify if they are the ones paying the royalties to themselves? Wouldn't that be net zero?
  
  Take it this way, if 1 person pays 10$ a month for Spotify and gets about 50 hours of music out of it, it's more beneficial for Spotify if a significant portion of that time is spent on music they pump into the playlists themselves, which costed them pennies to make, instead of having that user listen to real artists, that will ask for actual pay in exchange for their streams. They're not paying a little bit to make alot, they're paying a little bit to avoid paying even more. It's basically average desk job employee outsourcing their work to indians who get like a dollar a day and are happy with it cus it's their only option
  
  They don't pay equally to everyone. They benefit large artists more than smaller ones. If you only listen to your totally unknown friend's music on Spotify, most of your money will still go to popular artists you don't listen to, and your friend will get nothing because they're below the threshold of getting a payment. It's basically theft. Now if some of those popular artists are Spotify themselves behind the scenes, guess where your money is being funneled.
  
  Probably they find net zero (minus cost of hiring musicians) preferred over paying out a moderate income to actual artists. Capitalism at its finest.
- I don't think it's Spotify. Spotify already gets their cut, they have no reason to put out "fake music". This is a very well known "passive income" scheme. It's obviously real people doing it
- Not that it justifies what Spotify are doing, but the terms they have with the big record companies make it virtually impossible for them to increase their margins through other means. They lose $500m a year as it is.
  
  i understand entirely, it just felt like a good opportunity to say how spotify is trying to enlarge their size of the moneypie by eating out of hardworking musician's cut and simultaneously filling user's playlists with bloat
Sounds like they are just pissed that he found a way to beat them at their own game.
Nothing wrong with what the man did
They're just jealous they didn't get a cut
- The advertisers who spent 10m usd on fake "customers" disagree...
  
  Fuck 'em
Am i supposed to feel sorry for poor ol' RIAA being ripped off? 'Cos i'm not.
But when corporations do this, they are praised for brilliant innovative fiduciary prowess. 🙄
What a smart use of the system. too bad for him.
So OpenAI is revolutionary but this guys a criminal? wtf?!
- The main difference is who your mates are.
Isn’t that all that Facebook and Twitter is though?
Thank God the government is here to protect us from dangerous people like this man. /s
Hey can I do this but just enough to feed my family and keep my house ? I don't need 10 million 100k a year would do just fine for me !
Every day the Butlerian Jihad looks more and more enticing.

44 comments