A North Carolina musician has pled guilty to stealing $8 million in royalties with fake streams on AI-generated music in the first-ever criminal streaming fraud case brought by U.S. prosecutors.

Michael Smith, 54, copped to one count of wire fraud conspiracy on Thursday (March 19) in New York federal court. He agreed to forfeit his $8 million in streaming fraud proceeds and faces up to five years in prison.

“Michael Smith generated thousands of fake songs using artificial intelligence and then streamed those fake songs billions of times,” said Manhattan’s top federal prosecutor, U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton, in a statement Thursday. “Although the songs and listeners were fake, the millions of dollars Smith stole was real. Millions of dollars in royalties that Smith diverted from real, deserving artists and rights holders. Smith’s brazen scheme is over, as he stands convicted of a federal crime for his AI-assisted fraud.”

Smith remains free on a $500,000 bond until his sentencing hearing this upcoming July. His lawyer declined to comment on Thursday.

Smith was arrested in 2024 on a three-count indictment that charged him with using thousands of bots to continuously stream his songs on multiple platforms, including Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and YouTube Music, starting in 2017. Prosecutors said Smith originally used his own small catalog of human-made music for the scheme but later turned to AI for content.

In late 2018, Smith allegedly began working with the CEO of an unnamed AI music company to supply songs for his fake streams. The indictment says Smith promised to share the proceeds with this company, in the form of the greater of $2,000 per month or 15% of his monthly revenue.

Though this company is not identified in court papers, Billboard reported in 2024 that hundreds of the songs registered to Smith list Alex Mitchell, the CEO and founder of AI music company Boomy, as a co-writer. At the time, Mitchell told Billboard, “We were shocked by the details in the recently filed indictment of Michael Smith, which we are reviewing. Michael Smith consistently represented himself as legitimate.”

Mitchell has not been charged with any crime. The indictment denoted Smith’s AI music partner as “CC-3,” a shorthand for “co-conspirator” that is oftentimes used to denote an individual who has cooperated with prosecutors in exchange for amnesty. A rep for Boomy did not immediately return a request for comment Thursday.

Smith’s scheme eventually fell apart when his artificial streams were detected in 2023 by streaming platforms and the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC), the official organization designated by the U.S. Copyright Office to collect and distribute digital royalties for songwriters.

In a statement released Thursday, the MLC said Smith’s guilty plea “highlights the serious threat that streaming fraud poses to the music industry and the important role The MLC plays in confronting it.”

“We appreciate the Department of Justice’s swift action, recognizing that The MLC identified the fraud early, challenged Smith and his representatives, and prevented the diversion of mechanical royalties away from rightful songwriters,” added the MLC. “The MLC will continue to invest in anomaly detection and fraud prevention to protect our members, and we will continue to collaborate with other industry organizations and law enforcement to protect all songwriter royalties.”

As alluded to in the MLC’s statement, streaming fraud is a problem for artists and songwriters because digital royalties are paid out of a fixed pool — meaning fraudulent streams take funds away from the creators who actually have real listeners.

This issue has only gotten worse with the rise of AI music, which provides an easy tool for bad actors to quickly generate thousands of songs for their fake streams. Platforms like Spotify have responded by enacting strengthened policies aimed at reigning in malicious streams, but the problem persists.

Pearl Jam lead guitarist Mike McCready has spent 35+ years touring and recording with the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame group while watching some of the most beloved, talented voices and musicians of his generation pay the ultimate price for fame. At some point, it made the 59-year-old rock legend wonder if it was all worth it.

So, beginning during the COVID-19 lockdown, he started piecing together an ambitious rock opera telling the fictionalized tale about the brightest lights of that early 1990s grunge era in Seattle, forming it into the multimedia rock opera/graphic novel Farewell to Seasons, an ambitious project due out on Oct. 6 that will mark his debut as a lead singer.

“The characters are all based on real people in the scene you would know,” McCready tells Billboard, careful not to make the direct connections in order to allow fans to piece things together on their own. However, he’s quick to hint around them being inspired by too many fallen friends, including Mother Love Bone singer Andrew Wood, Alice in Chains and Mad Season vocalist Layne Staley, Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain and Soundgarden singer Chris Cornell, among others.

The story — told in the colorful, emotional graphic novel that will be published by Z2 — follows three artists on the Seattle scene, tracking their triumphs and tragedies as they are guided by an oracle, the Queen of the Seasons, who narrates the story. “It’s basically about walking with your darkness as an artist,” he says, citing The Who’s Quadrophenia and Tommy, as well The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the glam theatrics of David Bowie, KISS and Alice Cooper.

He’s recorded an album of his originals as well on which he sings and plays piano and guitar alongside backing vocals from Molly Sides (Thunderpussy), bass from Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan and Dave Matthews Band’s Stefan Lessard and drums from Mike Musburger (Fastbacks), Chris Friel (The Rockfords) and in-demand Seattle producer Nate Yaccino.

And while McCready has not figured out how, or if, he will tour the songs from the album he just finished mastering — an overture and six original songs on which he sings for the first time — he’s hoping to possibly go out on the road in the next year, depending on Pearl Jam’s schedule, of course.

Check out Billboard‘s chat with McCready about the project.

One of the things I was wondering when the news of this broke recently was whether you’re planning to mount a full opera performance of this album-graphic novel?

I originally wanted this to be written as a rock opera with Pete Townshend’s Lifehouse being the high-water mark, which I look up to immensely. I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could actually do something like that and write songs that were specifically about a story … a historical fiction that I was part of that scene and being in the front row of that. It was an exercise of, “I want to do something with this. I want to make a rock opera and be able to perform this some day, in whatever form that turns into.” And somehow it took this left turn into a graphic novel. That was not part of the process originally to do a rock opera. I’m looking at the high-water mark of [The Who’s] Tommy and [David Bowie’s] Ziggy Stardust and I wanted to push myself. I will eventually turn it into something, I hope.

Who might perform in it? Would it be a Tommy-like thing with a stacked cast of recognizable musicians and actors?

It’s a great question and I’m not sure I’ve thought that far ahead, because I want to make sure that I can actually do it. You have to have the money for it and the people behind you and that’s a whole new world to me that I don’t know yet. I have some friends in Broadway and some friends in the music business … I don’t know exactly how to start that process and I need help with that. I don’t have anybody in mind. I want to be able to do a really cool rock opera but with visual content. I don’t know how to mix those two worlds yet, but I’ve written a script for it and I have ideas on how everything should look.

Can you breakdown who inspired the various characters? Are there real-life analogues?

They’re based on all the people in the scene you would know. David Williams is myself. I wanted to create other characters other than myself and the singers of the scene. Jonathan Alexander is the tragedy of the scene, he’s the rock singer — it could be any one of those guys.

Like Mother Love Bone’s Andy Wood…

It’s a combination of all those guys. There’s a character named Angela May Sunrise, who is the female singer-songwriter based on Molly Sides from Thunderpussy or Brandi Carlile. I wanted to bring in a female character in the context of three characters going through their journey in the world of 1980s to mid-1990s Seattle as the scene was starting to explode. I wanted to give props to my old band, Shadow. We were kind of before all that Seattle scene stuff. We were all 16 and we toured a lot around Seattle. We played a lot, that’s where I spent my 10,000 hours. I’m very proud of that era, but it never got the historical props it should have because it kind of got overshadowed with everything else. I wanted to have a fantasy element to it. I love [Shakespeare’s] A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I love Oberon. I love characters that are mythical and tempt you and guide you, or take you down a dark road. I wanted to have an element of mysticism to it as well.

How long have you been working on this?

It started around COVID. I would have dreams about some of theses guys and they were kind of sad and I was like, “Man, everybody from this scene died. And why?” I get it, it’s addiction and all of these things and I’ve had my struggle with that. Was it worth it for all these guys? That’s the thing that was taunting me in all my questions and I wanted to write an artistic question to put out there in the universe and to have everybody answer it who wants to. Because I want to know, because I don’t know. That’s when I called [director] Cameron Crowe.

Tell me about that, because obviously you’ve known Cameron since the Singles days. What were you hoping for in calling him?

Cameron’s the best. Almost Famous is one of my favorite movies of all time. I want to live in that movie and I kind of have in a way. He’s been so good to me my entire career and he’s always supported me and given me advice, so I love Cameron deeply and I respect his vision. He knows the rock world and luckily I can call him and he gave me some great advice. When I was talking about the rock opera part of it and where to place certain songs, [he mentioned] the 11th hour song — which is where the character has to meet their fate or make a decision on where the story is going to go. I didn’t know that that was a thing. I’ve seen Hamilton and now I’m looking backwards at a lot of stuff and seeing the mechanics of these things that I don’t know, other than watching Tommy or listening to Ziggy Stardust or watching Rocky Horror Picture Show. 

You’ve had side projects like Walking Papers, Mad Season and Levee Walkers, but this is your first true solo effort. How did it feel taking that step outside for the first time and how did the rest of the band feel about it?

It feels scary in a great way. I’m a guy that always wants to push himself. I need to do that. I need to keep busy with stuff. Pearl Jam is my entity and I live in it, but I’ve got time to do things so I want to fill that in with creativity. As an artist I want to push myself through different boundaries. I’ve been taking singing lessons from this woman named Susan Carr here in Seattle for the past three years. I wanted to do something that forced me to sing, so I did a mini-rock opera within the context of this story. But I wanted to make sure I was f–king good! I feel proud about it. This is my solo experiment, who knows what it will turn into? I just hope that people dig it and it makes them want to listen to all the music from that time.

Have you played it for the band?

I haven’t played it for anybody yet. I think I might have sent one song to [bassist] Jeff [Ament] and he thought it was cool, but that’s it. I just mastered everything two days ago and there is no “perfect,” but I want it to be as close to perfect as it can be with the music before I start sending it out. That’s important to me as well, the story and the music and putting it together with the visual some day. For now, I’m just so honored that I got to do something with [graphic novel publisher] Z2. Their enthusiasm made me think I could do a graphic novel.

Are you nervous for them to hear it?

I’m excited for the guys to hear it when it’s ready. They’re my brothers, so I’d love to hear what they have to say.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but you’ve never sung on a Pearl Jam song right?

No. I may have done some backups on a Rockfords record once. I’ve been surrounded by all these amazing singers, there was Chris [Cornell], there was Layne [Staley], Ed [Vedder], Molly Sides, Brandi Carlile, [Mark] Lanegan. I was always around them, so I didn’t have a lot of self-confidence probably.

Do you think you’ll tour it and who would join you?

I’m thinking about that now and what’s the right way to do it and not lose money! I love playing with the women from Thunderpussy, they’re great musicians and they rock hard. We’ll just have to see when the book comes out and how the next year progresses.

On this week’s episode of All There Is With Anderson Cooper, singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles shared her unreleased track “Home” — a song sparked by an earlier conversation on the CNN podcast.

The track was written after Bareilles listened to a chat between host Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert during the podcast’s first season, when they shared their experiences with grief and loss. Their exchange resonated with Bareilles, who had been navigating losses in her own life, and she wrote “Home” as part of processing those feelings.

“I was really moved,” Bareilles tells Cooper. “I think you say it in the interview: It’s about telling your story, and about telling your story warts and all, is the thing that brings you back home. And I think of home as being a place of connection. Your soul is at peace and at rest when you’re in connection. … For me, on this earth, our work is to find ways to be bold enough to let other people see us. And telling stories is such an important part of that.”

In the clip above, premiering exclusively on Billboard, Bareilles plays a snippet of “Home” with vulnerable lyrics about losing her father when she was young: “I am one day older than my father was/ Than he ever got to be/ I was 10 years old when I grew up/ ‘Cause he died at 53.”

Cooper shared his emotional reaction after getting a sneak peek of the song, saying in the podcast intro: “You’re going to hear that song on the podcast today. It hasn’t been released yet, but Sara wanted all of us in this community to hear it first. I had not heard it in advance, and I was incredibly moved by it. I’m a little embarrassed about how emotional I got.”

Bareilles is currently working on her first full album since the COVID‑19 pandemic, with the unreleased track “Home” as part of the project.

In recent years, Bareilles has also coped publicly with the death of close friend and Broadway colleague Gavin Creel, the Tony Award–winning actor and singer who died in September 2024 from a rare and aggressive form of sarcoma. Creel, who performed with Bareilles in Waitress: The Musical and other stage productions, was widely mourned in the theater community, and Bareilles honored him at the 2025 Tony Awards.

In addition to her work on Broadway, Bareilles has had a long and successful career in pop music. She first gained mainstream attention with her 2007 hit “Love Song,” which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and continued her chart success with Kaleidoscope Heart (2010) and Amidst the Chaos (2019), both of which reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200.

Fans can catch the full conversation and hear “Home” when the episode drops Thursday (March 19) on cnn.com/allthereis.