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Michael Smith pleaded guilty in March 2026 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud in a music-streaming scheme involving AI-generated songs and bot accounts. The often-cited “$10 million” figure comes from the 2024 indictment, which alleged that amount; the later guilty-plea announcement reported more than $8 million in royalties and an agreed forfeiture of $8,091,843.64. Those are figures from different stages of the case, not one matching accounting.
What Smith was accused of doing
The case began with a September 4, 2024, indictment announced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. Prosecutors alleged that Smith’s scheme ran from approximately 2017 through 2024 and involved Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music. The indictment described three broad steps: create streaming accounts, use automated playback to generate streams, and collect royalties connected to those plays.
According to the indictment, Smith first used bots to stream music he owned, then expanded the operation with a large catalog of AI-generated tracks. Prosecutors said he spread streams across many songs rather than concentrating them on a few tracks, making unusual activity less conspicuous. The allegations are set out in the indictment; the original 2024 announcement said Smith was presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.
How streaming royalties made the scheme profitable
Streaming services distribute revenue through royalty pools, with allocations tied in part to streaming activity. The indictment said manipulated plays could therefore divert a portion of those pools from legitimate musicians and songwriters. It does not establish a specific loss for any individual artist, nor does it provide a platform-by-platform breakdown of payments.
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Prosecutors said the operation’s scale came from combining many accounts with a vast number of tracks. The 2024 announcement alleged hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs and billions of bot streams. Those figures describe the government’s charging-stage account of this case; they are not an industry-wide estimate of AI streaming fraud.
What the numbers mean at each stage
| Public account | Figure | What it represents |
|---|---|---|
| DOJ indictment announcement, September 2024 | More than $10 million | Royalties prosecutors alleged Smith fraudulently obtained at the charging stage. |
| DOJ plea announcement, March 2026 | More than $8 million | Royalties the government reported Smith obtained when announcing his guilty plea. |
| DOJ plea announcement, March 2026 | $8,091,843.64 | Forfeiture Smith agreed to pay under the plea announcement. |
The different totals should not be treated as identical findings: the first is the 2024 allegation, while the latter two were reported with the 2026 plea. The public releases cited here do not explain the accounting difference between the more-than-$10-million allegation and the more-than-$8-million plea-stage figure.
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The bot-streaming calculation cited by prosecutors
The indictment said an October 20, 2017, email Smith sent to himself calculated that 1,040 bot accounts could generate about 661,440 streams per day and $1,207,128 in annual royalties. That is the calculation prosecutors attributed to the email, not an independently audited measurement of actual streams or earnings. The indictment also describes account and bot numbers changing over time, so the email’s account count should not be read as a simultaneous total for the entire alleged scheme.
From indictment to guilty plea
- Approximately 2017–2024: The indictment alleged that the scheme operated during this period.
- September 4, 2024: SDNY announced a three-count indictment. Then-U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said, “As alleged, Michael Smith fraudulently streamed songs created with artificial intelligence billions of times in order to steal royalties.” The statement accompanied charges, not a conviction.
- March 19, 2026: SDNY announced that Smith had pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton said, “Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real.”
The plea announcement identified a five-year maximum prison term for the count and scheduled sentencing for July 29, 2026. A maximum penalty is not the sentence imposed. The DOJ materials cited here do not establish the outcome of that scheduled hearing.
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What the case does—and does not—show
The guilty plea marks a major change from the 2024 accusation: Smith admitted guilt to one conspiracy count, according to SDNY. But the public figures still need their procedural context. The charging-stage “more than $10 million” remains the indictment’s allegation; the plea announcement reported more than $8 million in royalties and the agreed forfeiture amount.
This prosecution illustrates how fake accounts and automated plays can exploit royalty systems that allocate revenue according to listening activity. The cited case materials do not establish how common such schemes are across the music industry, how much they cost artists overall, or what any particular artist lost.
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