---
title: "How One Man’s Bots Out-Streamed Taylor Swift and Got 18 Months For It"
description: "Michael Smith’s AI-song botnet pulled $8M from streaming royalty pools over seven years; DOJ wanted 46 months, got less than half"
author: "Luis Goa"
published: 2026-10-07T17:57:39Z
modified: 2026-10-08T06:01:14Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/how-one-man-s-bots-out-streamed-taylor-swift-and-got-18-mont-6127ec
language: en
tags: ["ai", "music", "fraud", "streaming", "justice", "tech"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# How One Man’s Bots Out-Streamed Taylor Swift and Got 18 Months For It

*Michael Smith’s AI-song botnet pulled $8M from streaming royalty pools over seven years; DOJ wanted 46 months, got less than half*

By Luis Goa · October 7, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/how-one-man-s-bots-out-streamed-taylor-swift-and-got-18-mont-6127ec

## In brief

- Michael Smith, 54, of Cornelius, NC, sentenced to 18 months for a 2017-2024 AI-song bot-streaming scheme
- Ordered to forfeit $8,091,843.64; platforms paid out over $14 million to him in total, per DOJ filing
- At peak, up to 10,000 bot accounts streamed his AI tracks; in one month they outstreamed Taylor Swift 9 to 1
- Sentencing guidelines ran 46-57 months; prosecutors sought 46, probation sought none, judge gave 18
- DOJ’s press release labels the case super-intelligence-assisted, per a September 29 Trump executive order renaming AI

$8,091,843.64. That is the exact forfeiture figure US District Judge John G. Koeltl ordered Michael Smith to pay on October 6, the agreed loss number both the prosecution and defense signed off on in Manhattan federal court, as [Ars Technica reported](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/outstreaming-taylor-swift-is-easy-with-10k-bots-and-ai-songs-fraudster-admits/). Smith, 54, of Cornelius, North Carolina, got 18 months in prison for it, plus two years of supervised release, after pleading guilty in March to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud.

The mechanism is simple arithmetic dressed up as a crime. Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music pay out royalties from a pool: a fixed cut of subscription and ad revenue divided among rights holders in proportion to their share of total streams that period. Add fake streams to that denominator and you take a slice of everyone else’s pool, not just the platform’s money. That is why the Department of Justice framed this as theft from “genuine artists and their fans,” not fraud against Spotify alone.

According to the government’s sentencing filing, cited by [Music Business Worldwide](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/man-behind-8m-ai-song-and-bot-streaming-fraud-is-sentenced-to-18-months-in-prison/), Smith’s operation ran from 2017 to 2024: thousands of fake accounts, hundreds of thousands of AI-generated tracks, billions of streams. An early version of the scheme used around 1,040 bot accounts to generate roughly 661,440 streams a day; at its peak it ran up to 10,000 bot accounts simultaneously, each opened with a fake email address and a fraudulently obtained debit card. Royalty-paying platforms paid out more than $14 million to Smith over the scheme’s life, per that filing; the $8.09 million forfeiture is the net the two sides agreed he actually pocketed after deductions.

**Smith's bots vs. Swift, April 2023** YouTube Music family-plan streams, millions

|  | Streams (millions of) |
| --- | --- |
| Taylor Swift catalog | 9.3 |
| Smith's AI songs | 80.9 |

Source: [US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York](https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/man-behind-8m-ai-song-and-bot-streaming-fraud-is-sentenced-to-18-months-in-prison/). Figures from the government's sentencing letter in United States v. Smith

The number prosecutors used to make the scale concrete: in April 2023, Taylor Swift’s entire catalog drew 9.3 million family-plan streams on YouTube Music. Smith’s AI-generated songs drew 80.9 million family-plan streams that same month, on the same platform, nearly nine streams of synthetic music for every stream of one of the best-selling artists alive. Family plans matter here because they are cheap to fake at volume: one subscription, several linked accounts, each one a stream source the platform’s fraud detection has to work harder to tie back to a single actor.

[![He Faked $10M in Streams With AI Listeners. Now He's Going to Prison.](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/t3AUHALHDeg/hqdefault.jpg)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3AUHALHDeg)

A short news clip covering Smith’s AI-stream scheme and his prison sentence. Video: The Rainmaker Report · YouTube

## Why 18 months, not 46

The sentencing guidelines range was 46 to 57 months. Prosecutors asked for at least 46. The Probation Office recommended 24. Smith’s own lawyers asked for probation, zero days, arguing in a letter that the Justice Department was punishing one man for “the ills of an industry” in its first prosecution of this kind, and that he never personally pocketed the full $8 million figure. Koeltl split well below all three asks: 18 months, a third of what prosecutors wanted and a quarter of the guidelines ceiling.

Smith’s defense also leaned on a comparison worth checking rather than taking at face value: a Danish bot-streaming case involving 689 tracks drew an 18-month sentence in March 2024, later raised to 24 months on appeal in February 2025, with only three months actually served under each version. If that comparison held, Smith’s imposed sentence landed closer to the harsher of the two Danish outcomes in months handed down, though with no suspension of the kind Danish courts applied. The Danish case covered three orders of magnitude fewer tracks than Smith’s hundreds of thousands, which makes the matching number 18 look more like coincidence than evidence of a shared standard.

The Music Fights Fraud Alliance, an industry group representing more than 40 companies including Spotify, Amazon Music, Meta, DistroKid, TuneCore and EMPIRE, filed a letter with the court arguing fraudulent streams “diluted the value of every legitimate stream occurring during the same accounting period.” Its executive director, Michael Lewan, told the court Smith “undermined trust in the music industry and stole $8 million.” The Mechanical Licensing Collective’s own filing, reported by [Digital Music News](https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2026/10/01/doj-cites-mffa-streaming-fraud-case/), noted that after Smith’s royalty payments were suspended, a representative emailed denying any “play manipulation,” and a separate attorney denied the works were AI-generated at all; both denials came after the platforms had already cut him off.

## The DOJ’s own headline calls it “super intelligence”

The Southern District of New York’s press release for this case reads: man sentenced to 18 months for “super-intelligence-assisted” music streaming fraud. That phrasing traces to an executive order President Trump signed on September 29, titled “Inaugurating the Era of Super Intelligence,” which directs federal agencies to replace “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” in official communications “to the maximum extent permitted by law,” according to the [White House fact sheet](https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/09/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-inaugurates-the-era-of-super-intelligence/). The order leaves the underlying legal definition of the technology, drawn from Title 15 of the US Code, unchanged; it renames the thing without reclassifying it. Acting Deputy Attorney General Trent McCotter followed up with an internal memo instructing DOJ staff that the new term applies “to court filings when appropriate,” as [Bloomberg Law reported](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/doj-staff-told-to-refer-to-ai-as-super-intelligence-in-court). Under this fresh terminology, Smith’s AI-generated songs became super-intelligence-generated songs in the DOJ’s own release; nothing about how he made them, or why he got caught, changed on September 29.

Set the rebranding aside and the actual engineering problem is the one streaming platforms have had since the royalty-pool model began: telling a stream that is statistically indistinguishable from a real one apart from a fake. Spotify told prosecutors in 2024 that its own safeguards had limited its exposure to roughly $60,000 of the roughly $10 million then alleged against Smith, which implies most of the loss landed on other platforms and on the shared royalty pool itself, where one company’s fraud detection does nothing to protect another’s payout. Smith pleaded guilty before trial, so none of that defense got tested in open court.

Smith’s lawyers told the court he had been offered a job doing “audio production, mixing, mastering, and recording for a record label” at $5,000 a month, and that prison would only delay his ability to repay the forfeiture. The government answered that Smith lied to investigators when first confronted and kept running the scheme after being warned off, the standard argument for why deterrence requires a sentence with teeth rather than a payment plan. Koeltl’s 18 months sits below every figure anyone argued for except Smith’s own request for none at all. The next number to watch is how the Justice Department prices its second case like this one, now that there is an actual sentence on the books instead of just a guidelines range nobody used.

## See also

- [SDNY press release on Smith's sentencing](https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-sentenced-18-months-prison-super-intelligence-assisted-music) — justice.gov · DOJ's own account, using the new super intelligence terminology
- [Musically on the sentencing](https://musically.com/2026/10/07/music-streaming-fraudster-michael-smith-gets-18-month-jail-sentence/) — musically.com · Additional reporting on the guidelines fight and Danish comparison