Boomy
When Michael “Mike” Smith was indicted Wednesday (Sept. 4) over allegations that he used an AI music company to create “hundreds of thousands” of songs and then used bots to artificially earn $10 million in streaming income since 2017, prosecutors claimed that some of the money flowed back to that AI music company. The indictment also claimed that Smith was in consistent contact with its CEO — but it never revealed their names.
ASCAP/BMI Songview records and the MLC database indicate that Alex Mitchell, CEO/founder of popular AI music company Boomy, is listed as the co-writer on at least hundreds of the 200,000 plus songs that are registered to Smith. Boomy also released a song, “This Isn’t Real Life,” jointly with Smith, CVBZ and Stunna 4 Vegas.
In a statement to Billboard, Mitchell says: “We were shocked by the details in the recently filed indictment of Michael Smith, which we are reviewing. Michael Smith consistently represented himself as legitimate.”
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The indictment alleges that around 2018, “Smith began working with the Chief Executive Officer of an [unnamed] AI music company and a music promoter to create thousands of songs that Smith could then fraudulently stream.” Within months, the CEO was allegedly providing Smith with “thousands of songs each week.”
In June 2019, the indictment says that Smith reported to the AI music CEO and the promoter that “we are at 88 million TOTAL STREAMS so far!!!” Smith explained to the CEO and promoter that his streams were earning about $110,000 per month and that the two men were each receiving 10% of the proceeds. Smith later asked the AI CEO to provide him with another 10,000 AI songs so that he could “spread this out more” with his streams. The indictment states that this was “to evade detection from streaming platforms.”
Eventually, according to the indictment, Smith entered a “Master Services Agreement” with this AI music company that supplied Smith with 1,000-10,000 songs per month. The deal stated that Smith would have “full ownership of the intellectual property rights in the songs.” In turn, Smith would provide the AI company with metadata and the “greater of $2,000 or 15% of the streaming revenue” he generated from the AI songs.
“Keep in mind what we’re doing musically here… this is not ‘music,’ it’s ‘instant music’ ;)” the AI CEO wrote to Smith in an email that was included in the indictment.
Mitchell’s publisher is listed as Songtrust, a publishing administration company owned by Downtown, which typically earns a percentage of signees’ royalties in exchange for services. Smith’s publisher, Smithhouse Music Publishing, also lists Songtrust as its point of contact on Songview.
A representative for Songtrust declined Billboard’s request for comment. However, a source close to the matter tells Billboard that Smith and Mitchell’s Songtrust deals were terminated more than a year ago.
While it is not unheard of for an AI company to be approached by customers who are looking to buy a large number of songs, multiple AI music executives tell Billboard that it is common to know why the customer wants the tracks and to do “KYC,” or “know your client,” checks to ensure they are above board.
Typically, customers for large sums of songs tend to be companies that are seeking cheap music alternatives, often for social media content. Other requests tend to come from unknown individuals outside of the U.S., especially streaming fraud hotspots like Poland, Ukraine, Russia, Vietnam and Brazil. These parties are often denied. Two sources say it’s surprising to see a CEO’s name listed in the credits as a songwriter when these transactions occur.
Boomy has been at the forefront of AI music since its infancy. Records vary as to when Boomy launched in beta, with some online sources saying 2018 and others saying 2019. It officially debuted in 2021, according to an announcement from Axios. The company claims on its website to have made over 20 million AI-generated tracks to date.
Boomy has also won the respect of the music industry establishment. For years, Boomy was distributing many of its AI tracks through a partnership with New York-based music services giant Downtown. Though this partnership was in place during the same time frame as Smith’s alleged fraudulent activities, it is unclear if any of Smith’s allegedly fraudulent AI tracks were distributed through Downtown. The indictment does state, however, that Smith used two distributors to upload content from 2017-2024, one based in New York and one based in Florida.
In May 2023, Boomy told users via Discord that Spotify had shut down its ability to upload songs to the DSP and that some of their released tracks had been removed. “This decision was made by Spotify and Boomy’s distributor in order to enable a review of potentially anomalous activity,” Boomy said at the time. Spotify later confirmed that the “anomalous activity” was related to possible streaming fraud detected on certain tracks. A Spotify spokesperson said at the time, “Artificial streaming is a longstanding, industry-wide issue that Spotify is working to stamp out across our service.”
In fall 2023, Boomy announced that it had partnered with fraud detection company Beatdapp to combat streaming manipulation. A month later, Boomy also announced that it had reached a new distribution partnership with ADA Worldwide, a company under the Warner Music Group (WMG) umbrella.
WMG is one of Boomy’s top investors, making both a pre-seed round as well as a seed round investment. Other Boomy investors include Sound Media Ventures, First Check Ventures, Intonation Ventures, Future Labs, Boost VC and Scrum Venture, according to Crunchbase.
According to Songview and the MLC database, the same tracks that list Smith and Mitchell as co-writers also list a music industry veteran named Bram Bessoff, founder of promotional platform Indiehitmaker. Typically, these tracks allocate 10% of publishing ownership and royalties to Bessoff, which matches the amount the indictment indicates was paid to the unnamed promoter. Bessoff’s publisher is listed as Songtrust as well. (A source close to the matter says Bessoff’s deal with Songtrust was also terminated more than a year ago).
Bessoff declined Billboard’s request for comment, citing his cooperation in the ongoing investigation.
Generative artificial intelligence is currently one of the hottest topics in Silicon Valley, and its impact is already being felt in the music industry. BandLab — the music-creation app that has become popular on TikTok — relies on AI as the engine for its tool SongStarter. Users can lean on it to generate beats or melodies at random, or prompt it to spit something out based on specific lyrics and emojis; BandLab’s 60 million registered creators are churning out more than 17 million songs each month, including breakout hits for dv4d and ThxSoMch.
The tracks that emerge from BandLab depend on the interaction of human creators and AI. That holds true for some of the companies focusing on functional audio as well. LifeScore, which uses AI to “create unique, real-time soundtracks for every journey,” relies on “Lego blocks of sound all made in a studio by real musicians playing real instruments through lovely microphones,” says co-founder/CEO Philip Sheppard. Even the sound of a stream trickling through a forest comes from “someone going out with a rig and standing in that stream and recording it.”
The AI kicks in when it comes to assembling that sonic Lego. “The AI is saying, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be delightful if these could arrange themselves in this different way?’” Sheppard explains. “’How about if we could turn that into eight hours that felt like it was original every time you listened to it?’”
All results of these processes may not work. “Unsuccessful soundscapes are generated all the time,” says Oleg Stavitsky, co-founder/CEO of Endel, which offers an app that generates music designed to help users focus, relax or sleep. “Each soundscape goes through a multi-step testing process: from automated testing, detecting sound artifacts and bad sound combinations to in-house testing to our community testing.” That community includes some 4,000 people who provide feedback through Endel’s Discord channel.
“We put human eyes on everything before it goes out,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a company that offers aspiring musicians the chance to make songs in seconds with help from AI tools. Since 2019, Boomy users have created over 12 million songs. “We have a generic content policy that basically means if all you’re doing is pressing buttons and we detect that, then your release probably won’t be eligible for distribution,” says Mitchell. “We reject way more releases than what gets submitted. That way we’re not flooding the [digital service providers] with a bunch of nonsense.”
How will Boomy scale this approach as it attracts even more users and generates even more millions of songs? “We’re hiring,” Mitchell says.
If you think 100,000 songs a day going into the market is a big number, “you have no idea what’s coming next,” says Alex Mitchell, founder/CEO of Boomy, a music creation platform that can compose an instrumental at the click of an icon.
Boomy is one of many so-called “generative artificial intelligence” music companies — others include Soundful, BandLab’s SongStarter and Authentic Artists — founded to democratize songwriting and production even more than the synthesizer did in the 1970s, the drum machine in the ’80s and ’90s, digital audio workstations in the 2000s and sample and beat libraries in the 2010s.
In each of those cases, however, trained musicians were required to operate this technology in order to produce songs. The selling point of generative AI is that no musical knowledge or training is necessary. Anyone can potentially create a hit song with the help of computers that evolve with each artificially produced guitar lick or drumbeat.
Not surprisingly, the technology breakthrough has also generated considerable anxiety among professional musicians, producers, engineers and others in the recorded-music industry who worry that their livelihoods could potentially be threatened.
“In our pursuit of the next best technology, we don’t think enough about the impact [generative AI] could have on real people,” says Abe Batshon, CEO of BeatStars, a subscription-based platform that licenses beats. “Are we really helping musicians create, or are we just cutting out jobs for producers?”
Not so, say the entrepreneurs who work in the emerging business. From their perspective, generative AI tools are simply the next step in technology’s long legacy of shaping the way music is created and recorded.
“When the drum machine came out, drummers were scared it would take their jobs away,” says Diaa El All, founder/CEO of Soundful, another AI music-generation application that was tested by hit-makers such as Caroline Pennell, Madison Love and Matthew Koma at a recent songwriting camp in Los Angeles. “But then they saw what Prince and others were able to create with it.”
El All says the music that Soundful can instantly generate, based on user-set parameters, like beats per minute or genre, is simply meant to be a “jumping-off point” for writers to build songs. “The human element,” he says, “will never be replaced.”
BandLab CEO Meng Ru Kuok says that having tools to spark song creation makes a huge difference for young music-makers, who, so far, seem to be the biggest adopters of this technology. Meng claims his AI-powered SongStarter tool, which generates a simple musical loop over which creators can fashion a song, makes new BandLab users “80% more likely to actually share their music as opposed to writing from zero.” (Billboard and BandLab collaborated on Bringing BandLab to Billboard, a portal that highlights emerging artists.)
Other applications for generative AI include creating “entirely new formats for listening,” as Endel co-founder/CEO Oleg Stavitsky says. This includes personalized music for gaming, wellness and soundtracks. Lifescore modulates human-made scores in real time, which can reflect how a player is faring in a video game, for example; Endel generates soundscapes, based on user biometrics, to promote sleep, focus or other states (Lifescore also has a similar wellness application); and Tuney targets creators who need dynamic, personalized background music for videos or podcasts but do not have a budget for licensing.
These entrepreneurs contend that generative AI will empower the growth of the “creator economy,” which is already worth over $100 billion and counting, according to influencer Marketing Hub. “We’re seeing the blur of the line between creator and consumer, audience and performer,” says Mitchell. “It’s a new creative class.”
In the future Mitchell and El All both seem to imagine, every person can have the ability to create songs, much like the average iPhone user already has the ability to capture high-quality photos or videos on the fly. It doesn’t mean everyone will be a professional, but it could become a similarly common pastime.
The public’s fascination with — and fear of — generative AI reached a new milestone this year with the introduction of DALL-E 2, a generator that instantaneously creates images based on text inputs and with a surprising level of precision.
Musician Holly Herndon, who has used AI tools in her songwriting and creative direction for years, says that in the next decade, it will be as easy to generate a great song as it is to generate an image. “The entertainment industries we are familiar with will change radically when media is so easy and abundant,” she says. “The impact is going to be dramatic and very alien to what we are used to.”
Mac Boucher, creative technologist and co-creator of non-fungible token project WarNymph along with his sister Grimes, agrees. “We will all become creators and be capable of creating anything.”
If these predictions are fulfilled, the music business, which is already grappling with oversaturation, will need to recalibrate. Instead of focusing on consumption and owning intellectual property, more companies may shift to artist services and the development of tools that aid song creation — similar to Downtown Music Holdings’ decision to sell off its 145,000-song catalog over the last two years and focus on serving the needs of independent talent.
Major music companies are also investing in and establishing relationships with AI startups. Hipgnosis, Reservoir, Concord and Primary Wave are among those that have worked with AI stem separation company Audioshake, while Warner Music Group has invested in Boomy, Authentic Artists and Lifescore.
The advancement of AI-generated music has understandably sparked a debate over its ethical and legal use. Currently, the U.S. Copyright Office will not register a work created solely by AI, but it will register works created with human input. However, what constitutes that input has yet to be clearly defined.
Answers to these questions are being worked out in court. In 2019, industry leader Open AI issued a comment to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, arguing that using copyrighted material for training an AI program should be considered fair use, although many copyright owners and some other AI companies disagree.
Now one of Open AI’s projects, which was made in collaboration with Microsoft and Github, is battling a class-action suit over a similar issue. Copilot, which is AI designed to generate computer code, was accused of often replicating copyrighted code because it was trained on billions of lines of protected material made by human developers.
The executives interviewed for this story say they hire musicians to create training material for their programs and do not touch copyright-protected songs.
“I don’t think songwriters and producers are talking about [AI] enough,” says music attorney Karl Fowlkes. “This kind of feels like a dark, impending thing coming our way, and we need to sort out the legal questions.”
Fowlkes says the most important challenge to AI-generated music will come when these tools begin creating songs that emulate specific musicians, much like DALL-E 2 can generate images clearly inspired by copyright works from talents like Andy Warhol or Jean Michel Basquiat.
Mitchell says that Boomy may cross that threshold in the next year. “I don’t think it would be crazy to say that if we can line up the right framework to pay for the rights [to copyrighted music], to see something from us sooner than people might think on that front,” he says. “we’re looking at what it’s going to take to produce at the level of DALL-E 2 for music.”
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