Almost no one Hit it in the music. The odds are too bad, it is a crime. But on a late spring evening in Louisville, Kentucky, Mike Smith and Jonathan Hay had a rare golden moment when everything hits. Smith on the guitar. Hay fiddled with on the drum machine and keyboard. Playboy is groove. The two musicians hope their first album will finally win the attention they have been chasing for years and hope their first album is surrounded by Hay's living room, surrounded by Chordophone and Grouting Gizmos.

It was 2017. The people in their forties were long-time collaborators and business partners, despite having a strange couple. Smith owns a range of medical clinics and wears tight shirts on his well-maintained muscles. He lives with his wife and six children in a sprawling house in the suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina. He judged and wrote a self-help book on the reality TV show. Hay - Laugh, soft, comfortable sweat and crocodile - lives in an apartment and is dating a stripper. He loves weeds. He has been a music PR person for many years. With reputation, he is best known in the industry for his connection with Jay-Z. Recently, he was impulsive and his sleeves were pricked. To avoid annoying his friend with health conditions, he will sneak into the bedroom vape.

Smith and Haye finished their album and called it jazz. That fall, they released it in all the usual places, including Apple Music, Tides, as a physics album. Alas, it failed to take off. Smith and hay are not numerous. A few years ago, several songs they played with other artists caused some buzz. So the two decided to retouch jazz And release an updated version and add new songs.

Jazz (Luxury) Released in January 2018. Right away, it hit the billboard list and hit No. 1. The hay is very happy. Finally, real, measurable success has arrived.

Then, suddenly, the album disappeared from the rankings. "No one will drop to zero next week," Hay recalled his confusion. He called other artists to ask if they had seen them before. They don't. Problems pile up. If so many people have heard of it, why do they suddenly stop? He scanned the internet for chatting endlessly. Even a weird tweet is great. Nada. Where fan? “No one is talking about music,” Hay realizes.

Hay pulled up the artist's dashboard for Spotify's dashboard and reviewed the two's work. The audience seemed to be concentrated in distant places such as Vietnam. Things only become strange from there. Hay remembers it this way: He started receiving notifications from distributors, a company that handles independent artist music licensing. The distributor is marking the music of Smith and Hay, jazz and other projects for streaming fraud and removing it. Smith told Hay it was a mistake, and the Hay screwed up ensuring the proper right to the sample. Hay tried frantically to correct the problem, but the marking persisted.

Hay, panic, let Smith help him figure out what was going on. Ultimately, Hay said, Smith offers some answers: Smith directed his medical clinic staff to stream. It doesn't sound like the complete story.

Then, last September, Smith appeared at the center of another music streaming event, a rather epic event. The FBI arrested him and charged him in the first AI stream fraud case in the United States. The government claims Smith made $10 million in royalties by using the robot army to continuously play AI-generated tracks on streaming platforms. Smith pleaded not guilty to all charges. (Through his attorney, Smith declined to be interviewed, so it was one side of Hay's story, confirmed by multiple interviews with people who worked with two men.