Virtually nobody hits it huge in music. The chances are so unhealthy it’s prison. 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 fidgeting 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 tissues. He lived in a sprawling home within the suburbs of Charlotte, North Carolina, along with his spouse and 6 children. He’d judged on a actuality TV present and written a self-help e book. Hay—bigger, softer, comfortable in sweatsuits and Crocs—lived in an condo and was courting a stripper. He cherished weed. He’d hustled as a music publicist for years; by repute he was greatest recognized within the business for selling a nuclear rumor that Rihanna had attached with Jay-Z. He’d lately, 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.
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 person drops off the following 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 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 have been flagging Smith and Hay’s music, from Jazz and from different tasks, for streaming fraud and pulling it down. Smith advised 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 continued.
Hay, panicking, badgered Smith to assist him determine what was taking place. Lastly, Hay says, Smith supplied some solutions: Smith had instructed his employees 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 somewhat epic. The FBI arrested him and charged him within the first AI streaming fraud case in the USA. The federal government claims that between 2017 and 2024, Smith revamped $10 million in royalties by utilizing bot armies to repeatedly play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not responsible to all costs. (By way of 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.)