Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
FBI arrest musician for streaming fraud and allegedly collecting $10million from AI-generated songs
nme.comStereogum, Smith may face roughly 60 years in prison.As per Variety, the musician was accused of creating thousands of bot accounts on streaming services such as Spotify and used them to stream music he owned and allegedly discovered ways around the platform’s fraud-detection programs all while creating as much AI music as possible.His indictment claimed that Smith emailed two co-conspirators and wrote: “We need to get a TON of songs fast to make this work around the anti fraud policies these guys are all using now.”The indictment also claimed that at the beginning of 2018, he worked with an AI music company as well as a music promoter to generate hundreds of thousands of songs.
It also claimed that he bought various email accounts and used VPNs as away to keep the services from discovering that he was controlling everything from his home in Cornelius, North Carolina.It also added that he had allegedly lied to royalty distributors, with his representative telling the Mechanical Licensing Collective (MLC) that his works are “human-authored.”The MLC previously doubted Smith’s authenticity last year and questioned how one would be able to create such a high volume of music so quickly without the use of AI.“We have clearly demonstrated that Mike Smith’s works are not AI-generated, but rather they are human-authored,” a representative told the MLC, according to the complaint.Smith was also accused of streaming fraud by a streaming platform in 2019 to which he denied and told the platform: “I have never done anything to artificially inflate my streams.”Countless musicians have been against the use of artificial intelligence in music, including the likes of Brian May, Ed Sheeran, John Lydon and more.One of the most prolific.
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