Nearly nobody hits it large in music. The percentages are so dangerous it’s legal. However on a late spring night in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay have been having that uncommon golden second when the whole lot 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 boys, 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 groups. He lived in a sprawling home within the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, together with his spouse and 6 youngsters. He’d judged on a actuality TV present and written a self-help guide. Hay—bigger, softer, cozy in sweatsuits and Crocs—lived in an house and was relationship a stripper. He beloved weed. He’d hustled as a music publicist for years; by fame he was finest identified within the business for selling a nuclear rumor that Rihanna had attached with Jay-Z. He’d just lately, on an impulse, had sleeves tattooed on his arms. To keep away from annoying his health-nut good friend, he’d sneak into his bed room to vape.
Smith and Hay completed their album and referred to 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; a couple of songs that they had 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. Immediately, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. Hay was elated. Ultimately, actual, measurable success had arrived.
Then, simply as all of the sudden, the album disappeared from the rating. “No person drops off the following week to zero,” says Hay, remembering his confusion. He referred to 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 all of the sudden 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 obtained 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 initiatives, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith informed Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had tousled securing the right rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to appropriate the problem, however the flagging persevered.
Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to assist him determine what was occurring. Lastly, Hay says, Smith provided some solutions: Smith had instructed his employees on the medical clinics to stream their songs. It didn’t sound like the total story.
Then, final September, Smith turned up on the coronary heart of one other music streaming incident, this one quite epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him within the first AI streaming fraud case in america. The federal government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith remodeled $10 million in royalties by utilizing bot armies to constantly play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not responsible to all fees. (By means of his lawyer, Smith declined to be interviewed, so that is very a lot Hay’s aspect of the story, corroborated by quite a few interviews with individuals who labored with the 2 males.)