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‘A Billion Streams and No Fans’: Inside a $10 Million AI Music Fraud Case
A chart-topping jazz album! Loads of Spotify and Apple Music plays! Just one problem: The success might not be real.
Holed up in Hay’s living room, surrounded by chordophones and production gizmos, the two musicians were hoping that their first album as a jazz duo would finally win them the attention they’d been chasing for years. In the government’s indictment, Mitchell fits the description of an unnamed, not-charged co-conspirator: Starting around 2018, a “Chief Executive Officer of an AI music company” provided Smith with “thousands of songs each week.” In the indictment, Hay—who fits the description of an unnamed “Co-Conspirator 2” and is not charged with a crime—comes across as something of a patsy, the person whose work Smith used to “fraudulently generate royalty payments” before pivoting to AI.
Or read this on Wired
