Nearly nobody hits it massive in music. The percentages are so unhealthy it’s felony. However on a late spring night in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay had been having that uncommon golden second when every little thing clicks. Smith was on guitar. Hay was twiddling with the drum machine and keyboard. Dudes had been grooving. Holed up in Hay’s lounge, surrounded by chordophones and manufacturing gizmos, the 2 musicians had 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, had 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 tissue. He lived in a sprawling home within the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, together with his spouse and 6 children. He’d judged on a actuality TV present and written a self-help guide. Hay—bigger, softer, comfortable in sweatsuits and Crocs—lived in an condominium and was relationship a stripper. He beloved weed. He’d hustled as a music publicist for years; by popularity he was greatest identified within the trade for selling a nuclear rumor that Rihanna had attached with Jay-Z. He’d not too long ago, on an impulse, had sleeves tattooed on his arms. To keep away from annoying his health-nut buddy, he’d sneak into his bed room to vape.
Michael Smith and Jonathan Hay had been longtime collaborators and one thing of an odd couple.
{Photograph}: Jonathan Hay; Getty Photos
Smith and Hay completed their album and referred to as it Jazz. That fall, they launched it on all the same old locations—Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal—and as a bodily album. Alas, it didn’t take off. Smith and Hay weren’t whole nobodies; a number 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. Instantly, it shot up the Billboard chart and hit No. 1. Hay was elated. Eventually, actual, measurable success had arrived.
Then, simply as abruptly, the album disappeared from the rating. “No person drops off the subsequent 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. In that case many individuals had listened, why did they abruptly cease? He scanned the web for chatter. Even a single freaking tweet would have been good. Nada. The place had been the followers? “Nobody’s speaking in regards to 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 had been flagging Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from different initiatives, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith instructed Hay it was a mistake and that Hay had tousled securing the correct rights for samples. Hay frantically tried to right the problem, however the flagging endured.
Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to assist him work out 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 relatively 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 revamped $10 million in royalties through the use of bot armies to repeatedly play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not responsible to all prices. (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.)
