A Cornelius man has been sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for using automated accounts to stream AI-generated music and collect millions of dollars in royalties, federal prosecutors said. Michael Smith, 54, pleaded guilty in New York to conspiracy to commit wire fraud. Along with the prison term, he received two years of supervised release and was ordered to pay $8.1 million. Prosecutors said Smith’s scheme ran from 2017 through 2024. He created thousands of accounts on services including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify and YouTube Music, then used artificial intelligence to produce hundreds of thousands of songs for the accounts to play. The resulting streams generated royalty payments, diverting money from legitimate artists, according to prosecutors. In April 2023, the bot accounts streamed Smith’s music 80.9 million times—nearly nine times the streams received that month by Taylor Swift’s entire catalog. By mid-2019, Smith was earning as much as $110,000 a month in royalties, prosecutors said. The case shows how fake listening activity can distort the systems streaming platforms use to distribute royalties, affecting artists who depend on those payments. Prosecutors described the operation as a fraud that exploited artificial intelligence and automated bots.