In October 2026, a judge in New York sentenced a man named Michael Smith to 18 months in prison. His crime was not hacking a bank. He made money from music, or rather, from music nobody really listened to.
According to the US Department of Justice, Smith created hundreds of thousands of songs with AI and used bots to stream them billions of times on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and YouTube Music. He pleaded guilty in March 2026 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and agreed to forfeit $8,091,843.64. Music Business Worldwide reported the sentence and noted the government's view that he took royalties belonging to genuine artists.
His case is the clearest picture we have of what "content farming" in music really is.
Two parts of the same scheme
People often mix these up, so it helps to separate them.
Content farming is producing tracks in bulk with almost no creative effort. Think thousands of short, generic instrumentals, "sleep sounds", or near-copies of the same song uploaded again and again under different names. AI tools have made this cheap.
Stream farming is faking the listening. Bot accounts, hacked accounts or rented phones play those tracks around the clock so they register as royalty-earning streams.
Each one is a problem on its own. Together they become fraud. In Smith's case, the indictment says he spread his bot plays across thousands of songs precisely so that no single track looked suspicious.
Why it hurts you even if you never touch it
Most streaming services pay rights holders from a shared pool. The money collected in a month is divided according to each track's share of total streams. If a farm adds a billion fake plays to that pool, the pool does not grow. Everyone else's share shrinks.
So when a Bhojpuri singer in Ara gets a real 50,000 plays from people who actually love her song, a bit of what those plays should have earned may already have been paid out to a bot farm somewhere. Nobody sends her an email about it. It just shows up as a slightly smaller number on her statement.
Deezer has put figures on this. It reported that up to 85% of streams on fully AI-generated tracks in 2025 were detected as fraudulent, and that it strips detected fraudulent streams out of royalty payments. Across its entire catalogue, it said, fraud accounted for 8% of all streams in 2025. That is a big slice of a pool meant for musicians.
Why platforms remove them
There are three reasons platforms now act fast against farms.
- Money. Every fake stream is paid out of somebody else's earnings.
- Trust. Listeners who open a "peaceful flute" playlist and hear the same generic loop forty times stop trusting recommendations.
- Catalogue clutter. Spotify said it removed over 75 million spammy tracks in a single year, a number close to the size of its genuine catalogue.
Platforms do not just delete tracks. They withhold royalties, flag the uploader, and can stop working with a distributor that keeps sending this material. That last point matters for honest artists. If the company delivering your songs also delivers junk, its relationship with the platforms suffers.
The pitch you will hear, and why to walk away
On Telegram and WhatsApp groups, offers like these circulate:
- "1 lakh Spotify streams for ₹999"
- "We will upload 500 tracks on your channel, you earn passive income"
- "Guaranteed editorial playlist, payment first"
None of this is a growth strategy. Bought streams get detected, wiped and often lead to the track being taken down. Mass uploads under your name can get your whole profile flagged. And as the Smith case shows, at scale this is treated as fraud, not marketing.
What real growth looks like instead
It is slower, and it works.
- Release songs you would be proud to play for your family.
- Pitch your song properly through Spotify for Artists before release day.
- Use Reels and Shorts to show the person behind the song: your village studio, your jagran stage, your rehearsal.
- Build one honest artist profile per platform and keep the name consistent.
- Collaborate with real singers and lyricists in your scene.
A distributor that sits on the right side
RMX Music is an Indian music distributor working with 3,000+ artists and 2,200+ labels, with 20,000+ tracks delivered to 95+ platforms. Artists keep 100% ownership and 95% of royalties, paid monthly. Releases typically go live within 24-48 hours, including callertunes, and YouTube Content ID with Visual Claims helps you collect when others reupload your work.
The Label plan costs ₹4,500 once, for life. Managers and agencies can pick the Agent plan at ₹15,000 lifetime. If you want your royalties to come from real listeners, sign up with RMX Music and release the honest way.