The $8 million AI music scam

A man named Mike Smith was recently sentenced to 18 months in prison, and a fine in excess of $8 million, for creating an AI system that faked billions of streams and earned him millions in royalties. Wired's Kate Knibbs explains how Smith pulled it off, how he got caught, and what this case means for the internet's growing slop problems. Vote for us in the Signal Awards! ⁠Vote Vergecast: Best Technology Podcast⁠ ⁠Vote Version History: Best History Podcast⁠ ⁠Vote Decoder: Best Business Podcast⁠ Further reading: ⁠Apple’s HomeView ad is confusing to everyone except parents | The Verge⁠ ⁠Ocarina of Time’s Switch 2 remake feels modern — and terrifying | The Verge⁠ ⁠We might not have to wait 13 years for the next GTA | The Verge⁠ ⁠Epic is bringing Fortnite to Linux | The Verge⁠ ⁠JPMorgan Chase is keeping AI agents out. | The Verge⁠ ⁠Wired: Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 2:13Speaker 00

  to AI his way into millions of dollars of music royalty. 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 preorder 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

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  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.

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  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, JP Morgan 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.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  I am very, very excited that you're here, and I am 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, 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, 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.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  So yeah, walk me through it a bit.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  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 are, 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 commonplace,

• 6:37Speaker 01

  where fairly well-established artists will take money from people who want to get a foothold in the music industry, and the, someone will like produce a remix of their song. And really, they'll just sort of pay them to use their, their music. So he was trying to make a name for himself as an artist and producer.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  Was he a good musician? Like, I'm sure you've listened to some of his stuff. Was he any good?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Sure. So he's just like, he's a guy. He's just like a guy who knows how to play the guitar. Okay.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I mean, some people, he knows how to play the guitar better, 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, 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, he sort of created this scaffolding of a career for himself

• 7:58Speaker 01

  without ever actually releasing music that anybody listened to or liked, which was impressive.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  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?

• 8:12Speaker 01

  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 nine to 11 people musical group with Johnny Depp's nephew.

• 8:33Speaker 00

  You know, like you do.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  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,

• 9:19Speaker 01

  tried every shortcut there was to try to make a name for himself. And then, once this new technology came around.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  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.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  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 if 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?

• 10:44Speaker 01

  No, I think you're totally spot on. And I went into reporting the story assuming it was just going to be this 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 um, 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.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  It's, it's really wild. So yeah, so he ended up like really succeeding in this novel art form of AI slop fraud. And he, you know, according to the US government, now he's pled guilty and, you know, is facing the crime, 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.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  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 $8,91,843.64 was what the government ordered him to repay. So that's, 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.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  So we know that he used a few different AI tools, including this AI song generation service called Boomi.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  Yes. And it's similar, you know, if listeners are familiar with like Suno or Udeo, 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, there's, it's, 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, is like

• 13:10Speaker 01

  a slot purveyor. So it's like the next thing, next thing that they gotta write about. But yeah, so he would quickly generate these songs, churn up 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 more, 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

• 13:55Speaker 01

  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 it's, you're 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. So he, and he did it for a while. And then there's a few different

• 14:30Speaker 01

  sort of bodies that, 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 the, some streamers didn't catch him for a while, some caught them, him pretty quickly. Like when I talked to Spotify, they were, they were like, we got him right away. He did not steal millions of dollars from us. He got like tens of thousands from them and then they caught him. But like, all of the various players did catch on that something funky was going on. And he put up a fight at first. The criminal complaint has a lot

• 15:13Speaker 01

  of interesting snippets from like his conversations of him saying, no, I didn't like, what are you talking about? This is all legit. He definitely tried to play it off. But eventually, you know, the government amassed enough evidence that they thought that they had a strong case against him.

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• 18:41Speaker 00

  It's the case against him that honestly sort of confuses me, and this sounds really stupid, but I find myself wondering what he did that was A, against platform rules and B, illegal.

• 18:57Speaker 00

  And because especially I think against platform rules is kind of where I want to start because if you rewind, what, five or six years ago, when he's at the kind of the heyday of this, nobody's talking about AI music, the like slopification of all these streaming services is, as far as I can tell, neither against the terms of service nor a real problem for these companies yet. And also, if it's illegal to put AI music on a streaming service, there are an awful lot of people who should be in jail. So like, if you go back to when he's doing this, what was he doing that he wasn't allowed to do?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  No, I think you're making a great point and a point that he, he brought up a lot.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting. Okay.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  As he was.

• 19:37Speaker 00

  Oh, no, I keep accidentally defending this guy. Okay. I don't know how I feel about that.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  No, because I was not sure how this case was going to play out after talking to like music industry legal experts, because it wasn't so clear cut, you know? It's fully permitted to put AI music on these platforms, like they, they don't have rules against that. Now, recently, they've sort of started tightening up a bit, like Spotify just removed 75 million AI generated songs, but there's nothing disallowing AI, like broadly speaking at all, and there never has been. I honestly think it'd be a pretty smart business idea to come up with some sort of like anti-AI, human artists only streaming network, but I also think that would be like impossible to monitor.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  So yeah, the, the thing that he did that was a crime wasn't putting all the AI songs on these platforms. It goes maybe a crime against taste, but not a crime against the law.

• 20:36Speaker 00

  Definitely was that. Yeah.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  The thing that they got him for, like the, the streamers do prohibit artificial like stream inflation. That doesn't mean, it still happens all the time. And there have been a lot of different, like very legit human musical artists who have been accused of like botting their streams and artificially inflating them.

• 20:57Speaker 00

  I mean, this has been true since like time immemorial on the internet, right? Like, as long as I have been covering this space, it has just been common knowledge that if you have $10 and 10 minutes, you can go buy yourself a million Instagram followers or as many views on YouTube as you want. Like, this is such a known quantity of the internet that it's fascinating to me that, that somebody got caught for it.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  It's, it's, it really is. And yeah, so that was technically against the terms of service, but whether it was criminal or not, I thought was very debatable. Like, they ended up charging him with fraud. It was, it was not one individual thing that he did, and it was sort of all of it together amounted to this duplicitous action that counted in their eyes as fraud.

• 21:45Speaker 00

  And I guess to some extent, it's probably the lying, right? Because you were saying when they were reaching out to him, being like, are you using fake accounts to stream your music? He was like, no, no, no, no, no, keep paying me my money. And I guess that, that at some point becomes a crime.

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, I wanted this to go to trial just as a reporter because it was going to be juicy. He hired Diddy's lawyer, legal team. So I really thought he was going to go to trial. And I honestly thought that he had a decent chance of winning because there had just never been a case mounted exactly like this before. And it was unclear that any one of the concrete steps that he took was criminal. However, he pled guilty and the sentencing, I mean, he's going to prison.

• 22:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Which is, is pretty wild to me. I gotta say, like, I do not condone streaming fraud at all. Should someone actually have to be behind bars? Is that a good use of like state money? I would, I don't think so. That's, that's what's happening. He's going away for 18 months. And the prosecution really pushed this idea that it would be a deterrent to others and that, you know, he was to be made an example of, and this is something that's like rocking the music industry. But it is kind of like, yeah, I'm sure, and you know, this is just me speculating, I'm not naming any names, don't sue me. But like,

• 23:13Speaker 01

  I'm sure that there are players in the music industry who are acting on behalf of real artists who have certainly thought about, you know, all of this artificial inflation. And yeah, it just seems kind of anticlimactic for this one random guy to be the sole, like dude who was going away or facing any sort of consequences.

• 23:40Speaker 00

  I mean, this is the same music business that tried to like punish college kids into oblivion for pirating music. So I can't say I'm completely shocked.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  It's giving Napster era, like, we're getting a little, you know, we're losing some perspective here, in my opinion. I would like them to go, to go again, up against more powerful players personally.

• 24:04Speaker 00

  So to that end, actually, one of the things I found myself wondering in researching this case is if he had just played it a little smaller, if he might have gotten away with it. Because I think the, the thing that you see now, and I think that there's been a lot of reaction to even after the sentencing of this case, is that everybody is just like, this is rampant in the music industry. The streaming services themselves are using AI generated music to take royalties that would otherwise be given to artists by putting those songs on the playlist. People are juicing their own streams, every, like, there was a whole kerfuffle over Drake and Kendrick Lamar and who was buying streams for what? And like, there, there is, like you said, a sense that this is just pervasive. And part of me wonders if, if Mike Smith had just been cool with like $2 million, if he

• 24:48Speaker 00

  would have just gotten away with it. Because this, this thing is so complicated to find on all sides, right? It is very hard to police what's AI. Back then, the idea of AI artists was new enough to be not really regulated in any meaningful way. And this world of music royalties is so diffuse and diverse and complicated that it actually seems like if you want to get away with a scheme, this is a pretty good one. He might have just gotten like a little bit too big for his britches.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  I totally agree. If, I'm sure that there are like dozens and dozens of just like mini Mike Smiths still operating that are just a little savvier. One thing I thought was interesting, I talked to some people who work for like anti-fraud companies that specialize in detecting AI music and fraudulent streams. Morgan Hayduk is one of the executives at one of these companies. He was telling me that an obvious mistake that Smith made was he was in the United States the whole time. And a lot of the people who are more

• 25:59Speaker 01

  of your straightforward, like AI slop entrepreneur grifters, they're doing it from, you know, a beach in Cambodia. And so he made himself a little too easy to find, basically. Should have gone abroad.

• 26:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes total sense. What do you think he was trying to do by doing it so broadly? Like, like you said, he made his own music. The simple thing to do would be to use your army of bots to go juice your own streams and make yourself a very popular artist. He did that a little bit, but he also created, like, the, the case for him just being a scammer is that he had lots of artists he didn't care about, making lots of songs, he didn't care about paying him lots of money that he did care about. Like, it would, it would be somehow more endearing if he was trying to do this to once again buy his way into music fame and fortune. Why don't, why do you think he didn't just do that?

• 26:59Speaker 01

  I think he, it was almost too low hanging a fruit. Like, it was so easy. And, you know, he and Jonathan, when they were creating all this music, and then he was going out and juicing the streams, they worked really hard. But, you know, two humans, it take, it still takes a while to make up songs and, and get in a studio. And it's so much quicker to just push a button. I think it was likely that he thought it was less risky to sort of diffuse the amount of bodied streams amongst like hundreds of thousands of AI songs.

• 27:35Speaker 00

  Yeah. This one artist nobody's ever heard of got a billion streams today is like, that's, you're going to flag the systems a lot more easily, I guess. Okay.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  We called the, the piece that I wrote about this, a billion streams and no fans, because that was like, even when they were still in the phase of Mike botting their songs, Jonathan thought it was really weird that they were getting on the billboard charts and like, no one knew who they were. So I do think, yeah, he probably realized that there was like a ceiling to how much he could juice his own career without people noticing. And, and at the, I mean, at the time that he was, was pulling this off, it just probably seemed like something that could still slip under the radar with the streamers. Clearly that did not work out, but yeah.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that makes sense. I guess if he was, it's certainly a lot easier to hide in vast quantities than to, you know, actually just try and juice your own streams to the moon. And this actually seems like the playbook that is being used all over the place with, with AI slop. You know, you've, you've covered a lot of these things from the people who are making AI versions of every successful book on Amazon, hoping some people will accidentally click on it and buy it. They make a little bit of money and some of them get removed, but you do it. I remember a couple of years ago, covering this podcast company that was like, we're going to make a billion podcasts. And if we only get 15 listeners to each one, we'll still make a ton of money because they're AI and, and it doesn't matter that it doesn't, the marginal cost of making them is nothing.

• 29:05Speaker 00

  The, the, I think you also covered a lot of the like websites that are being bought and turned into these slop farms because they have some SEO juice in Google. Like this just is the playbook now. And it, it makes me wonder if like, to some extent, Mike Smith, like kudos for being ahead of your time. He started doing this way before anybody else was talking about this. But also he is, in a certain way, it seems like even the prosecution has admitted that they are, they're trying to make an example out of him. That like, they understand this is a game being played on the internet at massive scale to sort of unknowably large amounts of money. And they have to put the fear of God into everyone doing it by kind of punishing this man.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it is something that is so overwhelming. I, I get the, I get the impulse to want to at least have one example to be made because anyone spending any time on the internet right now knows how, how flooded it is. Like you go to buy a book on Amazon and you have to click through like pages of versions of the book where there's one letter different and it's just.

• 30:11Speaker 00

  Oh yeah, it's awful.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Since I first started covering this in like 2023, there have been major moves from the platforms. Like when I first wrote about AI generated books on Amazon and talked to Amazon, they did not seem to realize the scale of the problem at all. And when I like brought up, are, are you going to come up with ways to flag AI contact? Like it didn't seem to be something that they had considered. And now they are, they have been like incrementally taking steps to try to limit the amount of books that people can self-publish. For instance, Spotify, as I was mentioning, like just removed 75 million songs last year. They like the, the music streamers really are realizing that this is an issue, that

• 30:57Speaker 01

  the labels are realizing this is an issue.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  Like even LinkedIn, which there was a moment when LinkedIn was like pushing people to use AI to make posts. And now they came out with their, the button that you can smash if you see AI slop on, on the, on the scroll. So like, there is this movement, I think, there is this recognition increasingly that this is a problem. This is distorting and diminishing the internet for people.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  And there are efforts to try to combat the delusional slop. I, I don't know if like this, this one guy going to jail is, is really going to do that much because I think that any wannabe AI slop grifter could look at this case and just be like, oh, I'll just, you know, again, do it from Thailand, do it from Mexico City. Take a few steps to obscure my identity, slap some crypto in there somehow.

• 31:59Speaker 02

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• 34:43Speaker 00

  Well, and there's a new wrinkle to this too, which you cover a lot now, which is prediction markets, which now give you yet another way to both slightly distance yourself from what's going on and to actually influence the outcome. Like there, there was a whole big kerfuffle recently about prediction market, prediction markets being manipulated to juice Spotify streams. Like all of this stuff is just, it's, I mean, it's just crazy. It's, it's manipulable slop nonsense all the way down. And, and it just feels like prediction markets throw a whole nother wrench into this system.

• 35:17Speaker 01

  I know, poor Mike, he missed his chance to make even more money because yeah, there was this whole thing where Spotify, like people were clearly artificially botting songs on Spotify so that they could make winning trades on prediction markets. Like there, there, this whole new incentive to, to bot has, has cropped up and I, I don't, I, I really, every day I wake up and I'm so grateful that I'm not in charge of like platform integrity for a social network. Like a nightmare to try to keep all of this at bay. Like it really does.

• 35:54Speaker 00

  Do you have a sense of whether these companies feel like they can get their arms around these problems? Or are we just spiraling into total nihilism about all of it? I mean, even the prediction markets would say they are taking efforts to make sure that these things are legitimate and that there's integrity in the process. And if you are going to lose your bet because somebody else juiced the Spotify streams, people are going to stop using prediction markets. So there's, there's incentive for all of these companies at every level to solve this problem, but it feels like in so many ways, the problem is just running so much faster. Like are the, are the folks you talk to who are trying to solve this problem actually optimistic that they can?

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Short of like throwing people into prison performatively to scare everybody else?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  I wouldn't say I'm, I'm hearing an overwhelming optimism. I think most people work for the companies would say to your face, like, yeah, we're fighting. And, and I do think that there have been positive steps towards like coming up with better spam filters to get rid of just straight AI generated slop on a lot of these platforms. But like, we're running into a moment where it's not just the purely, fully AI generated like shrimp Jesus, Mike Smith songs, like that bucket of content that's changing our experience of the internet. There's also just, you know.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  We are moving towards a world in which most things that we see online are at least AI assisted. And it's like, how do we move forward in that world and assess quality? Since I've been reporting on how like AI is changing the media, I've been slowly coming to terms with the fact that even though my sort of natural response to like using AI to to write a news article is kind of revulsion still, I don't think that that's going to be the case for the general public in even a few years. Like, I don't think most people care if if the content that

• 38:03Speaker 01

  they're consuming is partly AI generated or AI assisted. And so I'm still trying to figure out what that means.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I found myself wondering, again, in the case of Mike Smith, if if he had gone on a platform where there was sort of a less direct money system. And again, if he's just in it to juice views and appear to be famous and successful, if he'd gone on TikTok, right, and bought himself the same amount of views and the same amount of streams and this and then used that to go in some less direct way make money. It doesn't seem to me like TikTok or anybody else has tools or even incentive to go solve that problem. Right? Like, nobody, if I went and bought myself a million views on TikTok this afternoon, nothing would happen. Like, this TikTok has no incentive to do anything about it. It's a it's too big

• 38:54Speaker 00

  a problem. They don't care. It doesn't cost them any money. Anyway, whatever. It feels to me like the only problem here is that he made a lot of money. And so, again, and like, it makes sense, right? So these companies are going to chase after it where it really eats into their business. But then I think about Spotify is a good example. Does Spotify have any incentive to try and figure out what is and is not AI on its platform when it doesn't cost it any money? The answer seems like no. And so maybe everybody but Mike Smith will just get away with this.

• 39:24Speaker 01

  I'm surprised they've done as much as they've done at this point, because it seemed to me like, I guess it's just reputational, like, they don't want to have a reputation as being a slop purveyor. Like, the business mechanics, I don't think that there's like, a huge profit, like, direct profit incentive to remove slop. And again, like, as we're moving towards a time when most songs will have be touched by AI in some way, not that they'll be wholly AI generated, but AI will be used in the production process. I don't think it's feasible to come up with a like, this is AI, this is not AI, like, two categories. It's just going to get too tough. And I think that they will come up with ways, and they already

• 40:08Speaker 01

  kind of have come up with ways to filter out the songs that truly are just like Suno, Udo, you know, crumbs. But anything beyond that seems like a huge headache.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Agreed. And it's only going to get more so as these companies try to figure all of this out. All right. Well, Kate, I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you for coming on. This is this is really fascinating. I'm gonna go listen to a bunch of Mike Smith music. If it turns out it's great, I will report back and we'll talk about this again. But thank you for being here.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Kate for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, if you have a favorite Mike Smith song you want to tell me about, I would absolutely love to hear it. Email us, [email protected]. Call us, 866 verge 11. Ask us all of your questions. We're gonna get back in the cadence of doing a regular hotline episode every week. So send them all. I want to hear them all. We will do our best to answer as many as we can. Also, the best thing you can do to support all of this, everything we're up to here at The Verge, is to subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com/subscribe. It gets you all of our podcasts with no ads, including this one. It gets you all of our newsletters, all of our coverage of everything. There's a lot of gadgety stuff still to come this fall. You're gonna want to be in on all of it. Theverge.com/subscribe. Thank you in advance. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Podcast Network. This episode was produced by Josh Kahas, Kabir Chopra, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. See you tomorrow. Rock and roll.

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• 42:06Speaker 05

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