Nearly nobody hits it huge in music. The chances are so unhealthy it’s felony. However on a late spring night in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay have been having that uncommon golden second when all the pieces clicks. Smith was on guitar. Hay was twiddling with the drum machine and keyboard. Dudes have been grooving. Holed up in Hay’s front room, surrounded by chordophones and manufacturing gizmos, the 2 musicians have been hoping that their first album as a jazz duo would lastly win them the eye they’d been chasing for years.
It was 2017. The lads, then of their forties, have been longtime collaborators and enterprise companions—although they made an odd couple. Smith owned a string of medical clinics and wore tight shirts over his meticulously maintained muscle tissues. He lived in a sprawling home within the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, along with his spouse and 6 youngsters. He’d judged on a actuality TV present and written a self-help ebook. Hay—bigger, softer, cozy in sweatsuits and Crocs—lived in an condominium and was courting a stripper. He liked weed. He’d hustled as a music publicist for years; by repute he was greatest identified within the trade for selling a nuclear rumor that Rihanna had connected with Jay-Z. He’d lately, on an impulse, had sleeves tattooed on his arms. To keep away from annoying his health-nut pal, he’d sneak into his bed room to vape.
Smith and Hay completed their album and known as it Jazz. That fall, they launched it on all the standard locations—Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal—and as a bodily album. Alas, it did not take off. Smith and Hay weren’t whole nobodies; just a few songs they’d coproduced for different artists years earlier had gotten some buzz. So the 2 males determined to retool Jazz and launch an up to date model, including new songs.
Jazz (Deluxe) got here out in January 2018. Straight away, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. Hay was elated. Finally, actual, measurable success had arrived.
Then, simply as immediately, the album disappeared from the rating. “No one drops off the subsequent week to zero,” says Hay, remembering his confusion. He known as different artists to ask in the event that they’d ever seen this earlier than. They hadn’t. Questions piled up. If that’s the case many individuals had listened, why did they immediately cease? He scanned the web for chatter. Even a single freaking tweet would have been good. Nada. The place have been the followers? “Nobody’s speaking concerning the music,” Hay realized.
Pulling up Spotify’s dashboard for artists, Hay scrutinized the analytics for the pair’s work. Listeners appeared concentrated in far-flung locations like Vietnam. Issues solely received stranger from there. Right here’s how Hay remembers it: He began receiving notices from distributors, the businesses that deal with the licensing of indie artists’ music. The distributors have been flagging Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from different tasks, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith instructed Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had tousled securing the right rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to appropriate the difficulty, however the flagging endured.
Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to assist him determine what was occurring. Lastly, Hay says, Smith supplied some solutions: Smith had instructed his workers on the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn’t sound like the complete story.
Then, final September, Smith turned up on the coronary heart of one other music streaming incident, this one slightly epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him within the first AI streaming fraud case in the US. The federal government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith remodeled $10 million in royalties by utilizing bot armies to repeatedly play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not responsible to all expenses. (Via his lawyer, Smith declined to be interviewed, so that is very a lot Hay’s facet of the story, corroborated by quite a few interviews with individuals who labored with the 2 males.)
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