The Platforms Are Knocking, But NoBOTy Is Home

Audio Narration by Bri C. Boldon

For seven years, Michael Smith ran hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs through bot accounts. By the time he was caught, he was pushing roughly 661,000 fraudulent streams a day. And when he pleaded guilty, he forfeited nearly $8.1 million.

_This is not a story about one man getting caught with his hand in the cookie jar. It’s about all the other uncaught fingerprints left on the jar._

The music industry runs on listener appreciation. That’s what it uses to value and pay artists. But if that number has become disconnected from whether a real person actually wanted to hear the song, is there still honest money to be made? And if there isn’t, what are labels, lawsuits, and policing even protecting?

Nobody’s Policing Anybody

What drew me to this case was the idea that one man was able to take AI music and exploit the industry so easily. What kept me was something else — the idea of one man versus one large company. I spend most days as a nurse inside a system built entirely around transparency and accountability — where admitting a mistake is the difference between losing your license and getting a second chance. After 25 years in healthcare, that’s the ruler I measure with daily.

When you think this is just one man, one sinister dude trying to capitalize on a system, you’re missing something. Because when you understand there were more people involved, more people who are not named, more people who are not punished, he looks more like the fall guy than the actual ringleader. Is this one guy who happened to know somebody in the industry, and he was the mastermind? Or was this somebody in the industry, with a company, who thought of a way to defraud the system and got somebody to sign on to help them? The fact that the company isn’t named, and his co-conspirators aren’t named at all, leads me to think there’s a lot of money involved, and maybe Michael Smith didn’t have enough leverage to protect himself at the table.

But my gut tells me: if you’re going to commit fraud on this level, you need either big money or big connections. By his own account, in February 2024 he boasted his songs had pulled in over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties. He forfeited $8.1 million of that — and still walked away with roughly $4 million in hand. That’s not a man without money. Maybe it’s not big money or big connections. Maybe it’s both. One man running 661,000 fraudulent streams a day sounds like big connections — big, quiet connections. Ringleader or fall guy, he’s the one in front of us right now. And we’re witnessing what looks like punishment for one ringleader on a massive fraud case.

Policing Everyone But Themselves

We know this case exposed how easily the fraud worked. We also know that in the time since, the industry’s response has been more deals — not more policing. What we don’t know is how it actually ended for Michael Smith. What actually happened to him? Why is there no conversation about this case, when this case is so important to what’s going on? Because this case tells the music industry: yes, we must come in and police, because this is what happens if we don’t. This is opening the door for the music industry to come in and police everyone else, but maybe not necessarily themselves.

More Than the Money

We are supposed to be watching what’s happening to a ringleader — or a fall guy standing in for one. What should happen to someone who commits fraud? They should be penalized — fraud is fraud, whether it happens at a singular level or a company level. But the penalty should leave room so the next creative person, who hasn’t committed the same fraud, doesn’t get punished for it too.

Take Michael Smith. What I would say is this: he shouldn’t just forfeit money. He should forfeit the right, for a few years, to make money in this industry. The government penalizes by taking what he had. The industry should penalize by limiting what he can earn going forward — not forever, but long enough to send a message: what you lose if you commit fraud in this industry isn’t just the money you have. It’s the capacity to make money in the future.

Because an artist who isn’t making money right now has nothing to lose. Change that — not only are you not making money now, but your ability to make it has been limited — and now there’s a real deterrent. That’s a better way to hold the person accountable without penalizing everybody else.

I equate this to what happens in nursing. If a nurse is caught diverting medication, they aren’t automatically stripped of their license. They complete a rehab program. They can’t work with any drugs during that time, but they can keep a provisional version of their license. And after a few years without any deviant incidents, their license returns to normal. But that path only exists for a nurse who admits what they did and volunteers for the program. A nurse who denies it and refuses to admit wrongdoing loses their license entirely. I would say the same should apply to any artist. Someone who admits to the fraud gets a provisional path back — required to operate in a stricter fashion for a set amount of time, with the possibility of full standing restored. Someone who refuses to admit it doesn’t get the same offer.

The Penalty Is a Deal

Even if I expanded that to a company — if a company is committing fraud, how they’re allowed to do business should be more important than the money you take from them. You could take the profit, sure. But if they’re still allowed to conduct business as if nothing has changed, then the consequence is just a monetary slap on the hand.

Think of it like fines. To a company that doesn’t have a lot of money, a fine might be a big impact. But to a company like UMG, Warner, or Sony, who have a lot of money, a fine barely registers — the bigger the company, the less it deters them, because they have the money to absorb it. Look at Suno and Anthropic, both being sued left and right. But when you have a five-billion-dollar valuation, you have so much legroom that you don’t feel the need to curtail what you’re doing. So how you’re allowed to operate should be more of the penalty than how much it costs you to operate illegally.

Legal researchers have found the same thing — fines land on shareholders broadly, not on the people who made the decision, and some companies can even offset them through executive compensation. That’s part of why fines alone have never reliably stopped a big company from reoffending.

_Fining money a company already has is meaningless to shareholders. What they care about are fiscal budgets._

If you’re going to penalize them financially, a fine that included a forward fiscal budget reduction would be more meaningful than pulling money out of a pot they already have. Or a fine that limited a company’s ability to gain more investment profit — not customer revenue, investor money — that would matter too.

But even a better penalty only works if it requires the same thing I’m asking of an individual: an admission. The nurse doesn’t get her license back on a provisional basis unless she admits what she did. A company shouldn’t get to operate provisionally, on a path back to full standing, unless it admits to the fraud too. Right now, that’s not what’s happening. Suno’s tactics have been called borderline criminal in lawsuit after lawsuit, article after article — and none of that has required an admission of anything. What Suno is getting instead are licensing deals. Partnerships. The penalty isn’t provisional work earned through admission. The penalty is a deal.

One Handshake Away

My grandmother used to say: if you shake a hand, you meet a friend. That’s what’s happening in this industry. A handshake doesn’t just close a deal — it makes you friends, or at least mutually agreed to protect each other’s “assets.” It’s likely what kept Mitchell from ever being charged. It’s what Boomy’s relationship with Warner protects — not just from a lawsuit, but from the discussion, the news coverage, the attention. That’s why it’s so quiet, so hard to find. Everyone in this industry is one handshake away from everyone else, and that’s why nobody in it is really policing anybody.

_If you’re an artist or a listener still waiting on a lawsuit to fix this, that’s not what it was built to do._

Michael Smith wasn’t a company at all — he was one person, with no infrastructure and no legal team, running bots on top of platforms someone else had already built. That’s what fraud looks like when you don’t have a friend in the room. What fraud looks like when you do have a friend in the room is a story that’s already been reported: Billboard, Rolling Stone, and other outlets have named the CEO of a well-known AI music company as the likely unnamed co-conspirator, based on public songwriting-credit records. He’s never been charged.

Show Me the Kitchen

We’ve talked about the individual as a possible ringleader. We’ve talked about the company as one. What we haven’t talked about is the platform — maybe the biggest ringleader in the room, the one collecting money on every single stream, real or not.

Michael Smith had $8.1 million to forfeit. There’s no mention of what the unnamed company he was tied to made in profit. And what about the platforms? What was their profit in all of this? Did they have to forfeit any money for fake bot listeners? I’m not sure exactly how their shareholders and their company make money, but somewhere in that fiscal budget, there has to be room for real listeners. That’s who I think their profit should be coming from.

Verify Apple Music. Verify Spotify. These platforms are publishing monthly numbers telling us how many people are listening. But where is the AI detector that proves that’s actually true? Just when you think you don’t need AI detection, you absolutely do — just not where you assumed it should go.

And it’s worth saying plainly: it was never AI detection that caught any of this. Smith pulled in over $8.1 million before the Mechanical Licensing Collective caught what he was doing — not by listening to the music, but by asking whether one person could realistically produce that much of it that fast. No algorithm asked that question. A person did. It was basic math, the kind of thing that should be common sense — and it went undetected by everyone else in the industry anyway.

It’s the platform’s responsibility to make sure their numbers are accurate. I equate it to an old healthcare saying: a meteorologist can be wrong about the weather fifty percent of the time and still have a job. A doctor doesn’t have that same luxury, because they work with people, and real lives matter. If real lives matter, real listeners should matter too. I’ll stretch that to say a platform that produces numbers connected to profit should be held to the same standard. And it seems to me the real issue is what they’re actually listening to — because it isn’t their listeners. It’s something completely opposite. How else could thousands of bots go unrecognized?

As for the punishment — for platforms who processed these fraudulent streams and got paid for them — I think the analogy is still strong. The issue isn’t fines. It isn’t monetarily penalizing them. The issue has to be something that actually affects how they’re allowed to conduct business.

The Better Business Bureau was designed so people could report bad business conduct. Who reports bad business conduct when it comes to a platform? Shouldn’t that poor conduct show somewhere? Shouldn’t listeners know? Even a restaurant is required to post their inspection rating on the wall. What does Spotify have to show that they do good business, that their kitchen is clean?

I would say Spotify owes transparency to their listeners. But the problem is these platforms aren’t focused on their listeners. They’re focused on the money, and most could care less where the money comes from. As long as they show a profit, the shareholders are happy. But this, I think, is the time to stop focusing on the money and start focusing on the people. There are DJs and music curators out here making playlists — look at what’s on the playlists they build, because what’s coming out of those is the music people actually like and enjoy. That signal is more real than a raw stream count.

_The focus of this story isn’t artificial intelligence. It’s about artificial integrity — an industry that cares more about real money than real listeners._

What the Artist Does

The question was never whether the song came from a person. It’s whether the listen did.

• **Demand integrity** — from every platform that profits off their music.

• **Require transparency** — about what a stream is actually worth, and where that number comes from.

• **Insist on accountability** — real consequences for platforms that don’t protect artists’ right to fair competition.

The strongest thing an artist can do is join together with other creators in solidarity to lobby the platforms — to verify the listener, not the music, and to validate the process, not violate the artist.

What the Listener Does

Your job is presence — the one thing a bot can’t fake and the one thing an artist can actually feel.

• **Follow your favorite artists** — not just on social media, but on television, in film, wherever they show up. Meet them there. Show up on their fan pages.

• **Attend listening parties** — virtual or in person. Your face, your voice, your applause cannot be faked.

• **Demand their music when you go out.** Return the listener appreciation to the industry.

• **Buy the ticket.** Concert sales are still the most direct revenue stream an artist has — when your favorite artist is in concert, show up.

• **Tell people.** Talk about what you’re listening to and what you love. It’s as simple as that.

The goal is to make sure the artists you love can survive this industry because they have real community and connection to their listeners — enough that they don’t need the fraud to survive.

Three Beliefs

I believe that if we’re not careful, this game of charades is going to continue, because we haven’t figured out that this is where the policing really needs to be.

How do we justify the money artists make in relationship to streaming, when streaming isn’t actually attached to real people? That’s why I believe the listener matters most.

Look at the difference between a Grammy and a chart position. A Grammy is decided by an actual vote — real members, actually listening, actually choosing. A chart position is decided by a stream count, and right now nobody can say for certain what percentage of those streams came from real people and what percentage came from bots. One of those numbers has a person behind every single one of them. The other one doesn’t have to. That’s the whole argument, in miniature: which of those two do you actually trust?

For a real artist, that connection is everything — because an AI artist can never perform live. AI artists can have listening parties now — but they can’t perform at them, because they don’t exist in physical form. You can’t touch them. You can’t follow them the way you follow a real person. They will never have concerts. People love collaborations — there are no AI collaborations.

I believe there is still a real industry underneath all of this, and it will figure out a way to thrive — not by banning everything else, but by doubling down on what makes them unique. What makes them real. Community and interaction with their fans.

Rendered Sound · Veridem Holdings Inc.