88
US man pleads guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2026
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Technology
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I feel like I'm missing something in this article. If he was taking the music but also faking the play counts with bots, how were other artists missing out?
The streaming service pays them out of a pool proportionally. So he basically diluted the distribution from that pool, resulting in lower payments to everyone else.
How is that different from Spotify producing their own AI-gen music? Seems like that's 3-4 minutes of listening that otherwise would've been spent listening to an artist.
The crime here was faking the play counts with listening bots, thus closing the loop. If an artist built a machine to play their own song a billion times to make them money, that would also be a crime, I suppose.
No clue
That would be the missing bit! Cheers