AI songs beat Taylor Swift’s catalog with 80.9 million fake streams
A North Carolina man’s seven-year scheme shows how cheap-looking streaming numbers can distort music markets: in April 2023, his AI-generated songs pulled 80.9 million fraudulent streams, versus 9.3 million for Taylor Swift’s entire catalog. He used thousands of fake accounts, payment cards, and bots to spread billions of automated plays across hundreds of thousands of songs, avoiding detection by not concentrating streams on one track.