A North Carolina man is facing fraud charges after allegedly uploading hundreds of thousands of AI-generated songs to streaming services and using bots to play them billions of times. Michael Smith is said to have received over $10 million in royalties since 2017 via the scheme.

Alleged fraudster got $10 million in royalties using robots to stream AI-made music

and later the same article describes a scheme that apparently is “not illegal” but see whether you think it is right:

Matt Farley has written, recorded and uploaded tens of thousands of songs to streaming services about anything and everything people might search for, from celebrities and marriage proposals to many tunes about poop. Some songs are just a few seconds long, but the practice seems to be entirely above board. He’s said to have earned around $200,000 from his music in 2023.

I think streaming service algorithms take into account that a two second song should not be equal to an eight minute performance. Perhaps a two second song counts for half a stream, or only a third of a stream, but nevertheless the plays rack up and it obviously pays handsomely. It is quite rare for anybody make $200k a year in streaming. In fact earning $200k would put Matt Farley into the top 0.2% of streaming earners, assuming that he is on multiple platforms. 

About 13,400 artists generated $50,000 or more in Spotify royalties during 2020 – though there are an estimated total of approximately seven million acts with music on the platform.

13,400 Artists (Out of 7 Million) Earn $50k or More From Spotify Yearly

Those 13,400 artists are the top 0.2% of 7,000,000 acts.