Prosecutors seek at least 46 months for musician in AI streaming fraud case

Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to sentence North Carolina musician Michael Smith to at least 46 months in prison for AI-assisted streaming fraud.

The request came in a filing on 29 September, ahead of sentencing for the 54-year-old, who admitted in March that he used AI to create thousands of songs and then played them billions of times with automated bots, according to Billboard.

The proposed term sits at the bottom of federal sentencing guidelines for the case. Those guidelines call for between 46 and 57 months. Smith pleaded guilty to a single count of wire fraud conspiracy, a federal charge covering a planned scheme to obtain money by deception using electronic communications, which carries a maximum of five years. He also agreed to forfeit more than $8 million in proceeds.

Prosecutors say the scheme began in 2017. Smith was arrested in 2024 on a three-count indictment that accused him of running thousands of bot accounts to stream his tracks on Spotify, Apple Music and other platforms.

That matters because of how streaming payments work. Services pay out royalties, the payments owed for each play, from a finite royalty pool, a fixed pot divided according to share of total streams. Prosecutors argue Smith’s fake plays diluted the value of real listens and diverted money from legitimate songwriters and rightsholders to himself.

Smith’s lawyers have asked for no prison time at all. They said he was profoundly sorry and had accepted full responsibility, but argued that harm to any single artist was insignificant and that no victim suffered real harm.

The defence case rests on scale. The losses, Smith’s team argued, were spread across millions of songwriters and artists, leaving no perceptible loss for any one person, as reported by Music Business Worldwide. The guilty plea was announced by U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Federal probation officials have recommended a different outcome: 24 months. The judge is not bound by either recommendation.

What makes this stand out is its place in the record books. The case is the first criminal enforcement in the United States over streaming fraud. The sentence, when it comes, will set the early measure for how courts treat bot streams and AI-generated tracks as financial crime.