Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media. I'm your friend David Pierce, and today on the show, we're going to talk about one man's scheme to AI his way into millions of dollars of music royalties. The guy's name is Mike Smith, and he became one of the most important and, frankly, first cases to figure out what is streaming fraud, can you use AI to make and listen to music, and what does it all mean? Kate Knibbs from Wired has been covering this story for years now and is going to come on the show and tell us all about it. But first, here's everything else happening on The Verge today. This is 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, October 14th, 2026.
Everybody is still getting used to the idea of the Apple Home View. Apple's $299 smart display is up for pre-order now, and it's designed to be kind of your family's central control system. It's for your smart home, communications, everything. I will say I've been pretty surprised at how much of the reaction to this has been from people who watched that three-minute video about family chaos and the Home View and decided they just simply do not want another screen, another device, another thing to manage and worry about and have listening all the time. At this point, it's been a long time since I've been this curious how a new Apple product will go down when it goes on sale.
Meanwhile, here's some rapid-fire good news about video games. Fortnite is coming to Linux eventually now that Epic has said it's reworking its anti-cheat software to work on the platform. Next, according to a big Bloomberg report out today, Rockstar is confident that whatever comes after GTA 6 won't take another 13 years to come out because building GTA 6 also meant building a ton of tools and tech that'll make the next games much easier. And The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake, which is out in a couple of weeks, appears by all accounts to be beautiful to look at and delightful to play. Thank goodness.
And finally, there's a war brewing between the AI agents that want access to all of your data and every website and app on the planet and those websites and apps that are simply not interested in that trade. The latest example: JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon just said that the company is blocking agents from doing banking things on customers' behalf. This fight is coming for every single surface of the internet. Get ready. You can read more about all this at theverge.com. That is 90 seconds on The Verge for Wednesday, October 14th.
All right, let's talk streaming. Kate Knibbs, welcome to The Vergecast.
I am very, very excited that you're here, and I'm very excited to talk about this particular case, which I have been fascinated by for years and kind of thought I would never have a chance to talk about on this show. And then we got the ending of it, and so now we get to talk about it. But you have covered this in much greater detail than I have over the last couple of years. And so I want to kind of rewind to the beginning for people who don't know what's going on. They don't know who Mike Smith is. They don't know how all this happens. I just want to dig into how all of this happened and what it means about the world we live in now. So, let's start at the very beginning. Tell me a little bit about Mike Smith, the person at the center of this case.
Absolutely. Okay. So, I found out about Mike Smith because I was sort of on this roll of covering different crimes involving AI slop. And he was arrested, and there were some news articles that, you know, basically just said this man named Mike Smith was arrested. It's the first criminal charges brought against someone for AI streaming fraud. And it made it sound like he was just some random man. And I went and ended up talking to people in his circles and, like, trying to understand who he was and how he ended up doing this novel kind of crime, and found out that he had actually been in the music industry for many years and had been actively trying to make it. And there was like an interesting buildup to this crime that I think is really important to know about to, like, put it in its proper context. So...
Yeah, walk me through it a bit.
Yeah, he didn't just go from, like, law-abiding citizen to super AI scammer. There were steps along the way. Like, he was running a series of urgent care clinics in North Carolina. Like, he wasn't in the music industry at all. But he wanted to be a musician. And so he would sort of use his profits from the healthcare industry to try to make it in the music industry. You know, he would self-produce all of these music videos that, a lot of them are still on YouTube, and they're incredible artifacts. And then he would basically sort of pay artists to produce their songs. He was sort of part of this weird pocket of the music industry that I didn't realize existed but is actually pretty common, where fairly well-established artists will take money from people who want to get a foothold in the music industry, and someone will, like, produce a remix of their song, and really they'll just sort of pay them to use their music. So, he was trying to make a name for himself as an artist and producer.
Was he a good musician? Like, I'm sure you've listened to some of his stuff. Was he any good?
Yeah. Um, not... I mean, I wouldn't run out and, like, buy the vinyl. I probably wouldn't get up and turn it off.
Sure. So he's just like, he's a guy. He's just like a guy who knows how to play the guitar. Okay.
Yeah. And I mean, some people... he knows how to play the guitar better than many. Better than many. He met this man named Jonathan Hay. They started a record label. They started, like, signing artists and then still sort of doing this pay-to-play situation where they... he ended up financing a reality show about who the next great rapper would be that actually aired on BET, and Mike Smith was a judge of, like, who the next great hip-hop artist will be. And it was because he, yeah, he, like, entirely financed it. But so he sort of created this scaffolding of a career for himself without ever actually releasing music that anybody listened to or liked, which was impressive.
So he's buying himself sort of the, like, credibility of someone who is in the music business without actually doing the music part of it.
He was doing the music part of it. I think that's important in his defense. He was making the music. It's just no one was listening to it. He wasn't gaining a fan base. And he was doing all sorts of projects. Like, at one point he was part of a large, like, 9 to 11 people musical group with Johnny Depp's nephew.
Sure. You know, like you do.
Yeah. And so he was just, he was basically, like, flinging everything, all the spaghetti to the wall to see what would stick, and nothing was really sticking. And I ended up, when I was researching this case, connecting with Jonathan Hay, his old, like, business partner, creative partner, and he was, like, really willing to talk about what had gone down between them. And he was eager to tell me that Mike had been experimenting with artificial streaming for years prior to the AI stuff, and they had had this whole falling out over it. And the AI stuff was sort of just taking it all to the next level. Like, he tried so many years to be a musical artist, tried every shortcut there was to try to make a name for himself. And then once this new technology came around, he didn't actually abandon the idea of making it as an artist himself, because he was still trying to do that. He had this, like, cartoon with Snoop Dogg, and, like, his fake career was actually going better than ever while he was doing the AI gambit.
But he realized that he could profit a lot if he just, like, applied what he had learned trying to make his music go viral with AI songs.
Wait, so this is a really interesting connection, though, because it does seem like there's one way to look at this case that is very straightforward sort of AI slop arbitrage, right? I found a way to make a bunch of money by making a bunch of AI content, and that is absolutely everywhere on the internet right now. And I want to talk about some of that too, because I think this case is the beginning of many, many things like it to come.
Yes. But also, there is some... I don't know, like, I hesitate to say Elizabeth Holmes, but there is some kind of, like, fake it till you make it thing going on here that he's just, like, you can sort of see this guy who believes he is one turn, one break, one moment away, like, if only I could just get this one other thing going, and he almost sort of slippery slopes his way into this giant AI scheme. I don't know. Am I giving this man too much credit at this point?
No. Oh, I think you're totally spot on. And I went into reporting the story assuming it was just going to be the sort of AI slop hustler entrepreneur arbitrage that I had been seeing in other parts of, like, the internet and media, and then finding out that actually it was a slightly more complicated story. And I suspect... I have not interviewed him because he was basically awaiting trial while I was reporting the story, and then ended up pleading not guilty. But my hypothesis is that had he succeeded, he would have, like, redirected the money that he got from his AI slop back into his career. Like, he wouldn't have given up.
It's really wild. So yeah, so he ended up pulling, like, really succeeding in this novel art form of AI slop fraud, and he... you know, according to the US government, and now he's pled guilty, and, you know, is facing the... managed to make millions and millions of dollars from a bunch of different streaming services, creating hundreds of thousands of AI songs and then getting untold numbers of bots to just loop them on repeat.
Yeah. So, yeah. So, walk me through this flywheel. He creates this sort of fascinating closed AI all the way down system to do it. I wound up finding the number was $8,918,436.64 was what the government ordered him to repay. So, that's the amount of money at the end of this.
Tell me about the system he built that pulled all of this money in his direction.
So, we know that he used a few different AI tools, including this AI song generation service called Boomy.
That was like the pre-Suno, right? It was one of the first ones to be out there letting you generate music like this. Okay.
Yes. And it's similar, you know, if listeners are familiar with, like, Suno or Udio, same concept. You can just basically put in a few prompts and create songs very, very quickly. And so he would create these songs, and then he would create fictitious musical artists. And, you know, it's pretty easy to put music up on the major streamers right now. There's usually distribution services you can pay to put music up. There's actually a really interesting ongoing lawsuit between Universal Music Group and one of these distribution companies called DistroKid, and UMG is arguing that DistroKid is, like, a slop purveyor. So it's, like, the next thing that I got to write about. But yeah, so he would quickly generate these songs, churn out some musical artists, spray them onto the platforms, and then he would basically create networks of bots to stream all of the songs on loops, and then he would... I don't know exactly how he got the money, like whether there were intermediaries to make it less obvious or what happened, but then he ended up, you know, funneling the money back to himself. And I want to point out, so $8 million in the era of bajillion-dollar valuations for AI companies might not sound like that much money, but music streaming pays nothing. So, it's actually an insane amount of money to make off of streaming. Like, it's superstar... like, maybe not superstar, but you are a very successful musician if you are making that kind of dough off of the streaming services. So even though it's not money that Dario or Elon would care about, this is, like, huge money in the music biz.
He, um, and he did it for a while, and then there's a few different, um, sort of bodies that, uh, they don't regulate the music industry, but they're sort of keeping it in check, like the RIAA. And at one point he kept getting flagged by, like, the distribution companies and...
