News Summary

• North Carolina resident Michael Smith, 54, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud.
• Smith earned royalties from 80.9 million streams of his AI-generated songs by bots with family accounts.
• That’s nearly 9x more than Taylor Swift's entire music catalog earned in the same period.
• Smith faces 18 months behind bars, then two years of supervised release, and an order to pay $8,091,843.64 in forfeiture.
• The first-ever criminal case involving AI-assisted music streaming fraud has concluded.