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Smith's scheme, which prosecutors say ran for seven years, involved creating thousands of fake streaming accounts using purchased email addresses. He developed software to play his AI-generated music on repeat from various computers, mimicking individual listeners from different locations. In an industry where success is measured by digital listens, Smith's fabricated catalog reportedly managed to rack up billions of streams.

AI music wasn't really the point. It was the huge number of fake accounts and taking actions to avoid getting caught. But in our current age, you need to tie everything back to AI to get people's attention. And I'll admit: it worked on me, too.

I'm not positive, but I may have run into this guy on Spotify. Several months ago I was listening to Spotify and was recommended two songs in a row that sounded very similar, but had very subtle differences in them. For instance, the baseline in one was slightly altered, and the main synthesisor sounded slightly different. But the overall rhythm and melody were more-or-less the same.

I was able to find 100s of versions of what were essentially the same song with a different title, artist and album art. I made a playlist of them all, but it looks like Spotify removed all but two of the songs I had added:

Obsidian Sisterhood by Aggaraway

Konnual by The Sirens

Edit: just found another one. Beasratis by Olrul

Im so glad this is what they’re spending their time investigating instead of, yknow, the massive Russian misinformation campaign being pushed to the american public by mainstream media outlets owned by right wing nut jobs.

I see nothing wrong with this Robinhood tactic.

Impressive, but seems destined to fall apart. Companies like Spotify presumably have a sense of how "normal" users listen to music. You'd have to spend a fair amount of time mimicking that or you'd get found out eventually. (As he did)