An alleged scammer has been arrested under suspicion that he used AI to create a wild number of fake bands — and fake streams to with them.

The songs that the AI CEO provided to Smith originally had file names full of randomized numbers and letters such as “n_7a2b2d74-1621-4385-895d-b1e4af78d860.mp3,” the DOJ noted in its detailed press release.

When uploading them to streaming platforms, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music, the man would then change the songs’ names to words like “Zygotes,” “Zygotic,” and “Zyme Bedewing,” whatever that is.

The artist naming convention also followed a somewhat similar pattern, with names ranging from the normal-sounding “Calvin Mann” to head-scratchers like “Calorie Event,” “Calms Scorching,” and “Calypso Xored.”

To manufacture streams for these fake songs, Smith allegedly used bots that stream the songs billions of times without any real person listening. As with similar schemes, the bots’ meaningless streams were ultimately converted to royalty paychecks for the people behind them.

    • MentalEdge@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      0·
      4 months ago

      No.

      Music play-farming has been a thing for probably almost a decade by now.

      Spotify divides the huge amount of money they get from subscribers each month, evenly among all the plays during that month.

      Someone figured out ages ago, that since spotify has a free tier, that means that if you can get some tracks on spotify as an artist, you can then create an army of free-tier bot accounts and massively inflate the share of the money you get paid as an “artist”.

      Of course, this comes at the cost of everyone elses legit plays becoming worth less. Its an absolutely disgusting scam and Spotify has been ignoring it happening for years.

      Adding AI generation into the mix is barely an innovation.

      Edit: And if you’re wondering how it works with services that don’t have a free tier, it is done by hijacking peoples real accounts, then having them stream the relevant tracks over and over. Either by stealing entire accounts, or infecting devices that are already logged in with malware that will open the relevant app/website and play the tracks over and over.

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.eeEnglish
        01·
        4 months ago

        Fuck Spotify, they can eat a bag of dicks after renewing Joe cum-guzzling Rogan for $200million. They deserve to have all of their money stolen.

  • jordanlund@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Not sure how this is a crime… breach of TOS, sure, but a crime?

    What law is being broken here?

    If his fake bands are being paid for bot clicks, that’s a problem for the platforms to figure out. They need to examine their TOS.

        • emax_gomax@lemmy.worldEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          I hate ads but their designed to be shown to people and intentionally using bots to inflate ad views is very clearly fraud. Silicon valley had something similar with bot farms to fake user engagement to take in VC funding. You take money in exchange for some kinda engagement metric which you’re faking.