Spotify
Musician admits to $10M streaming royalty fraud using AI bots
North Carolina musician Michael Smith has pleaded guilty to collecting over $10 million in royalty payments through a massive streaming royalty fraud scheme on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. 54-year-old Smith bought hundreds of thousands of songs generated using artificial intelligence (AI) from an accomplice, uploaded them to these streaming platforms, and […]
Spotify abused to promote pirated software and game cheats
Spotify playlists and podcasts are being abused to push pirated software, game cheat codes, spam links, and “warez” sites. By injecting targeted keywords and links in playlist names and podcast descriptions, threat actors may benefit from boosting SEO for their dubious online properties, since Spotify’s web player results appear in search engines like Google. Spotify playlists pushing warez […]