"The scheme was lucrative. In a 2017 email to himself, Smith calculated that he could stream his songs 661,440 times daily, potentially earning $3,307.20 per day and up to $1.2 million annually."
and
"The NYT reports that in an email earlier this year, he boasted of reaching 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019."
https://www.eyeandpen.com/new-york-times-ownership/
"As alleged in the Indictment:[1]"
and
"[1] As the introductory phrase signifies, the entirety of the text of the Indictment, and the description of the Indictment set forth herein, constitutes only allegations, and every fact described therein should be treated as an allegation."
note: https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=661440*365&ia=calculator gives us 241,425,600 possible streams that either did or did not receive over a million dollars a year. so, according to the indictment, the defendant intended a quarter of a billion streams to receive over a million dollars each year.
"SMITH fraudulently obtained more than $10 million in royalty payments through his scheme."
[$1,207,128 by 6 years would have been $7,242,768, so maybe the estimate was wrong or the scheme could have intensified. here it is on page 6 of the 18 page indictment: "At certain points, SMITH had as many as 10,000 active Bot Accounts on the Streaming Platforms."]
"U.S. Attorney Damian Williams is credited in the press release as saying "Today, thanks to the work of the FBI and the career prosecutors of this Office, it’s time for Smith to face the music." also, FBI Acting Assistant Director Christie M. Curtis is credited in the same press release with saying "The FBI remains dedicated to plucking out those who manipulate advanced technology to receive illicit profits and infringe on the genuine artistic talent of others."
lying to the public, that sounds very serious. thinking about other concerns too i suppose, like lying to the authorities, especially with people in recent memory prosecuted and convicted for doing so. forged documents and falsification of government records also appear as if of interest in the news lately.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/media/1366241/dl ⬅ again, the indictment as a pdf
[not seeing a date on this digital document. maybe i've missed it.]
quoting the indictment anyway: "As a result, streaming fraud diverts funds from Songwriters whose songs were legitimately streamed by real consumers to those who use automation to falsely create the appearance of legitimate streaming."
and
2 of 18 "Generally, the Streaming Platforms are required to pay a certain percentage of their revenues (the "Revenue Pool") to Performance Rights Organizations ("PROs"), for the right to publicly perform songs (known as performance royalties), and to the Mechanical Licensing Collective (the "MLC"), 1 for the right to digitally reproduce and distribute songs (known as digital mechanical royalties). The Streaming Platforms also send data on streaming activity along with the Revenue Pool, which is then used by the PR Os and the MLC (collectively, the "Rights Organizations") to proportionally allocate and disperse payments from the Revenue Pool to the Songwriters whose songs were streamed during the same period that the Streaming Platforms earned the revenue."
and
3 of 18 "4. The funds used to pay royalties to performing artists, record companies, or other sound recording distributors ("Artists") are also obtained from the Streaming Platforms. Like songwriter royalties, Streaming Platforms are generally required to pay a pool of royalties to Artists for the right to stream the sound recordings that embody musical compositions. This sound recording royalty pool is also often calculated as a certain percentage of Streaming Platform revenues, and the royalty pool is then allocated proportionally among Artists based on their respective percentages of total streams. These allocated royalty funds are then paid directly by Streaming Platforms to Artists (through the record companies and music distribution companies)."
and
12 of 18 "In a February 2024 email, SMITH boasted that his "existing music has generated at this point over 4 billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019." "
and
3 of 18 "As a result of his false and misleading statements, SMITH fraudulently obtained millions of dollars in royalty payments from the Streaming Platforms, Rights Organizations, and music distribution companies."
and
2 of 18 "At all times relevant to this Indictment, individuals could stream music through music streaming platforms such as Amazon Music, Apple Music, Spotify, and YouTube Music (i.e., the Streaming Platforms). Each time a song is streamed through one of the Streaming Platforms, the songwriter who composed the song, the musician who performed it, and in certain cases other rights holders, are entitled to small royalty payments. The exact amount of the royalty payments owed varies depending on a number of factors, but it is often less than one cent per stream."
giving you the bird | 4:35.8 - 5:35.8 🐦🔥
looking at the press release by using firefox's ctrl-f feature i get 43 matches for "bot" (from page 2 of the indictment to page 17 of the 18 page document) and get 9 matches for "bot" in the september 4th press release. at least some of those "bots" were virtual machines, running on cloud computers? i suppose violating the terms of service for the provider(s) of those cloud available computers is similar to hijacking internet capable devices. the indictment doesn't really mention (or charge) violations of terms of service in relation to involving any cloud service providers. the press release doesn't mention either virtual computers or the cloud. it's possible that in using multiple cloud services that he could have done all of the fake streaming just using their mainframes (violating terms of service as provided) without installing a single, virtual machine to run code. the indictment references virtual computers three times. mostly "bots" are how they have referred to virtual machines (which they only called virtual computers) or have they used "bot" or "bots" more like chatbot than like hijacked devices connected to the internet? which or how many cloud service providers employed wasn't described in the materials released.
https://vodkaonthelawn.tumblr.com/
