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> The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven
by mistersquid 2y ago
> The man, Michael Smith, 52, was accused in a federal indictment unsealed on Wednesday of stealing royalty payments from digital streaming platforms for seven years. Mr. Smith, a flesh-and-blood musician, produced A.I.-generated music and played it billions of times using bots he had programmed, according to the indictment.
Fascinating. Comments in the OP (presently 18) question whether Smith’s scheme is illegal or merely an unethical exploitation of a loophole.
One commenter raises the point that humans are coerced into producing meaningless content only to be exploited by large corporations. Other commenters question whether streams need be listened to by humans at all.
What if the stream is being “listened” to by an algorithm or as training data for a neural network? What if the stream is being played to people engaged in other tasks or to pre-verbal children, to people in their sleep?
What qualifies a stream to be non-fraudulent?
- moi2388 2y agoI think they will argue that intent matters. This was clearly intent to defraud for personal enrichment. My bet is he will get convicted.
- lordloki 2y agoWith the way that most of these algorithms use views/clicks/listens to promote the material, this could have been an attempt to find an actual human market.
- nickff 2y agoIt might have been, but he was likely violating the usage agreement, and even if he hadn’t been directly profiting from the scheme, he was running the equivalent of a unsuccessful DDoS attack.
- blitzar 2y agoGiven the number of listens (fraudulently) achieved, I would expect the algorithms to push the music on to other (human) listeners. This is why every youtuber instructs people to "smash, like, and subscribe" - to game the algo and push their content to others.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y agoLike in many fraud cases, it seems kinda beyond the point to inspect technical equivalencies here. The core reason this was fraud is that he went out of his way to deceive the platforms about what he was doing, because he knew that they wouldn't pay him if not for his misinformation about the identity of the artists or the location of the listening bots.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoSounds like many big YouTubers. The difference is they usually do find an audience and then they can cool off with the bots. The intent is there but in the end the corporation ends up benefiting from the fraud.
- mac-attack 2y agoI'll bite. How does Spotify benefit from paying $10m to an artist that few people have heard of/listen to?
- johnnyanmac 2y agoEasy, by using that engagement to attract 100m more users over 7 years (and I may be conservative here, since apparently they have 600m users in 2024). Which over that time will make them more than $10m, directly and indirectly. It's pretty much the Dead Internet theory fully realized. Also, If this artist was making that much imagine how much Spotify was making on their natural cut.
- ryhdyrdeyedy 2y ago[dead]
- positr0n 2y agoWhat engagement? The artist and the streams were all faked by one person. That's going to convince 100M more people to sign up?
- woolion 2y ago>One commenter raises the point that humans are coerced into producing meaningless content only to be exploited by large corporations. Shouldn't the prosecutors take action against this? This trend has caused considerably much damage to the various entertainment industries, it is absolutely destroying their profit margins, and putting people out of work.