Copyright Office Opens Inquiry Into Music Streaming Fraud

The U.S. Copyright Office has opened a public inquiry into music streaming fraud and is asking artists, labels, distributors, streaming services and anyone else affected to explain how fake streams are made, what they cost and how to stop them. Written comments are due November 23, 2026. The notice came one day after a federal judge sentenced Michael Smith to 18 months in prison for using AI-generated songs and bot accounts to collect more than $8 million in royalties.

The Office published its notice of inquiry in the Federal Register on October 7 (Docket No. 2026-6). It responds to a May 21 request from Rep. Scott Fitzgerald, who asked the Office to examine the prevalence of streaming fraud across digital platforms and how it may be affecting the music industry as a whole. The Office says the answers, together with its own research, will help inform Congress.

What the Office wants to know

The Office describes streaming fraud as artificially raising a song’s play counts through bot farms, click farms, playlist stuffing, account hijacking and similar methods, which dilutes the royalty pool for songs that were legitimately streamed. The notice lists ten subjects for comment, including:

• How fraud is carried out and what data exists on the prevalence of specific schemes, from bot farms to fraudulent marketing companies.
• The economic impact, current and projected, and how fraud relates to AI-generated music.
• Live music. Whether fraud affects venue selection, ticket sales and secondary sales such as merchandise, food and beverage, and parking.
• What is being done and whether it works: trusted-distributor programs, content and customer verification, royalty clawbacks, fines, content removal and the vendors platforms hire to detect fraud.
• Shared data: suspicious-activity reports, a shared database of known fraud, standardized metadata and labels for content that is ineligible for statutory royalties.
• Possible fixes, from voluntary industry practices to legislation, including whether no-fault injunctions or new information-sharing rules could help, and how criminal enforcement could improve, including state and local prosecutions and the use of streaming fraud by organized crime.

Why the Office says it matters beyond royalties

Streaming drives around 70 percent of global music sales, according to an industry estimate cited in the notice, and U.S. streaming revenue for record labels is roughly $9.5 billion, based on 2025 industry figures. The notice treats the dilution of the royalty pool as the primary harm of fraud. It also names secondary ones: changes to where a song lands on a playlist or in an algorithm’s queue, distorted data that artists and venues use to decide when and where to tour, and a lower chance that fans discover lesser-known artists.

The notice points to cases abroad, including a Danish man sentenced to prison for inflating stream counts and a report from Sweden that found crime networks using false streams to launder money, and says concern is growing that organized crime will use streaming fraud for that purpose.

The Smith sentence

On October 6, Judge John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Smith to 18 months in prison, followed by two years of supervised release, and ordered the forfeiture of $8,091,843.64. Smith pleaded guilty on March 19 to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, according to the Justice Department.

The department says the scheme ran from 2017 to 2024. Smith created thousands of bot accounts, at times using as many as 10,000 at once, and had them stream hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs billions of times. In April 2023, the department said, those accounts streamed Smith’s music 80.9 million times through family plans, in the same month that Taylor Swift’s entire catalogue received 9.3 million family-plan streams on YouTube Music. The department called it its first-ever criminally charged case of AI-assisted music streaming fraud. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said Smith “exploited super intelligence technology to generate a fraud.”

Prosecutors had sought at least 46 months, the low end of the federal guideline range of 46 to 57 months, and the court’s probation office had recommended 24 months, Music Business Worldwide reported. Smith’s lawyers had asked for probation with no prison time. The 18-month term is below both figures. IFPI, the recorded-music trade body, said the result sends a clear message that streaming fraud is a crime with serious consequences.

Key dates

• October 6, 2026: Smith sentenced in New York.
• October 7, 2026: Copyright Office notice of inquiry published.
• November 23, 2026, 11:59 p.m. Eastern: initial written comments due.
• December 21, 2026, 11:59 p.m. Eastern: reply comments due.

How to comment

The Office is taking comments only through regulations.gov, using the online comment form. According to its submission instructions, short comments of up to 5,000 characters can be typed into the form, longer ones must be uploaded as a single file, and everything submitted becomes public. Organizations must give the name of an authorized representative. Those who cannot file electronically can contact the Office for special instructions.

What it means for radio and airplay data

SpinCounts tracks radio airplay, not stream counts, across 6,700+ stations, most of them in the U.S. The inquiry is about streaming services, not broadcast radio, but it puts a question to everyone who relies on music data: how do you know a number is real?

A radio spin is a station’s decision to play a record, logged with a station name and a time, so it can be checked against something outside any streaming platform. That does not make radio immune. The FCC requires disclosure when anything of value is paid for airplay, and unreported payment is known as payola. Promoters who sell “guaranteed spins” are a version of the same problem, which SpinCounts has covered in its report on whether a chart position can be bought. No monitoring service sees every station, and any spin count is best read as “at least this many” across the stations being monitored. Details are in the methodology.

For artists, DJs and stations, the inquiry is an invitation to say which numbers they depend on and how they check them. Artists can claim a page or pull a free airplay report (an account is required) to see which stations played their music and when.

Frequently asked questions