In a lakeside house outside Charlotte, North Carolina, a middle-aged man sat reading aloud to his wife. The words he recited were not from a novel or a letter. They were YouTube comments, praise heaped on songs by artists with names nobody had ever heard of, performing tracks nobody had ever consciously chosen to play. The comments, like the songs, like the listeners who supposedly loved them, were fake. The man reading them was Michael Smith, and over the course of seven years he would extract more than ten million dollars from the global music economy using a method so mundane in execution and so devastating in arithmetic that it has forced the industry to confront an uncomfortable question: what happens when the systems built to pay artists become easier to rob than the artists are to support?

Smith pleaded guilty in March 2026 to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, in what prosecutors described as the first criminal streaming-fraud case of its kind. He is one man. The problem he embodies is now measured in the billions. By the spring of 2026, the scale of AI-assisted streaming fraud had grown so large that it had become, in the framing of much of the trade press, a self-sustaining machine: hundreds of thousands of synthetic tracks, armies of bots, and a royalty pool that distributes real money to fake art at the direct expense of real musicians. The victims are not the major labels, who can absorb the loss in a rounding error. The victims are the session players, the independent songwriters, the bedroom producers and the touring journeymen for whom a few hundred pounds of streaming income each quarter is the difference between a viable career and a relinquished one.

This is the story of how generative AI turned a long-running nuisance into an industrial enterprise, why the people getting hurt are the ones least able to afford it, and why the question of who should fix it has no comfortable answer.

The Wannabe Rock Star Who Cracked the Code

Michael Smith was not, by the account assembled in Rolling Stone's investigation, an obvious criminal mastermind. He was a suburban father and former urgent-care clinic owner who had been born in Philadelphia, raised in northern New Jersey, and had picked up a guitar at the age of four before teaching himself bass, drums and piano. He studied finance at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He had built genuine wealth across a string of ventures, from a Y2K remediation company to medical practices in two states. He claimed to have five thousand of his own songs stored on his phone. In 2016 he turned up on a reality television show, positioning himself among judges including RZA, T.I. and DJ Khaled.

What he wanted, by the testimony of those who worked with him, was recognition. One former collaborator, the producer Othr Bestlasson, recalled his first impression with brutal economy: “From the first moment I met him, I was like, 'Oh, my God, this guy's fake as fuck.'” Another, the creative director Sabrina Kelly, compared him to Michael Scott from the American version of The Office, noting what she described as a “childlike yearning for acceptance”. He was, in other words, exactly the sort of person the modern music economy is supposed to crush: an ageing hopeful with more ambition than audience.

Instead, he found a loophole. As early as October 2017, according to the indictment, Smith documented a system generating 661,440 streams per day across 1,040 fake accounts, and projected that this would yield roughly 1.2 million dollars a year in royalties. The maths was simple and merciless. Each individual stream was worth a fraction of a penny. But streams, unlike songs, scale infinitely if you automate the listening. Smith built up a network of bot accounts that at its peak reached as many as ten thousand active at once, registered using fake email addresses bought in bulk and set up partly through outsourced labour. He routed the traffic through virtual private networks to mimic geographically dispersed human listeners, and he spread his streams thinly across an enormous catalogue of tracks so that no single song spiked high enough to trip the platforms' fraud detection.

For a while, the catalogue was the bottleneck. A few thousand original songs could only be streamed so many times before the pattern looked suspicious. Smith needed volume, an effectively bottomless supply of plausible-sounding tracks to spread his fake listening across. That is where artificial intelligence entered the picture, and where a private hustle became a preview of an industry-wide crisis.

When the Music Became Free to Make

According to prosecutors, Smith struck an arrangement with the chief executive of an AI music company to obtain a vast catalogue of computer-generated songs. Court documents identified this figure as a co-conspirator without charging him; reporting by Rolling Stone named him as Alex Mitchell of Boomy, an AI-music startup, who later said he had been unaware of Smith's intentions and that “Michael Smith consistently represented himself as legit.” Whatever the precise understanding between the two men, the mechanism it unlocked is the heart of the matter. Smith was reportedly receiving thousands of tracks a month, paying for them and metadata, then uploading them under a sprawling roster of invented artist names. The bots did the rest.

This is the pivot on which the entire modern fraud turns. For most of recorded history, the cost and effort of producing music functioned as a natural brake on this kind of scheme. You could fake the listeners, but you still had to come up with the songs, and songs were expensive, slow and human. Generative AI removed that brake entirely. Tools such as Suno and Udio can now produce a finished, fully mixed, vocally complete track from a short text prompt in under a minute, at a marginal cost approaching zero. The constraint that once made large-scale streaming fraud impractical has simply evaporated.

The consequences are visible in the upload statistics, and they are staggering. By April 2026, the streaming service Deezer reported that AI-generated tracks accounted for 44 per cent of all newly uploaded music on its platform, with the service receiving almost 75,000 fully AI-generated tracks every single day. That figure had climbed steeply over a matter of months; in January 2026 the daily total had stood at around 60,000, then roughly 39 per cent of deliveries. Crucially, Deezer found that consumption of this material remained tiny, between 1 and 3 per cent of total streams, which tells you something important: this is not a flood of music that people want to hear. It is a flood of music that exists to be streamed by something other than people.

Deezer's data made the fraudulent intent explicit. The company found that up to 85 per cent of the streams generated by fully AI-produced tracks were themselves fraudulent. In other words, the vast majority of AI music on the platform is not merely synthetic; it is synthetic content being played by synthetic listeners, a closed loop of machines manufacturing the appearance of cultural activity in order to siphon real money out of a shared pot. The songs are fake. The streams are fake. Only the royalties are real, and they have to come from somewhere.

The Pool Everyone Drinks From

To understand who pays for that, you have to understand the single most consequential and least understood feature of how streaming money moves: the pro-rata royalty pool.

When you pay your monthly subscription to Spotify or Apple Music, your individual money does not follow your individual listening. It is poured into a single enormous pot, alongside the subscription fees and advertising revenue of every other user in your market. At the end of the accounting period, the platform takes its cut and then divides the remaining pot among rights holders in proportion to their share of total streams. If a given artist accounts for one in every thousand streams on the service that month, they receive one-thousandth of the payable pool. This is the pro-rata or market-centric model, and it is how the overwhelming majority of streaming revenue is distributed worldwide.

The design has a property that is easy to miss and impossible to overstate. Because the pool is finite and shared, every stream dilutes every other stream. A fraudulent play is not a victimless act of theft from the platform's own reserves. It is a withdrawal from a communal account that every legitimate musician on Earth is also drawing from. When Michael Smith's bots generated billions of streams across his catalogue of phantom songs, they did not conjure new money into existence. They enlarged the denominator. They increased the total number of streams the pool had to be divided across, which means every real artist's slice of that pool became fractionally thinner, quarter after quarter, year after year, without any of them ever knowing it was happening.

This is why the framing matters so much. A casual observer might assume that streaming fraud is a crime against Spotify, or against the major labels, or against the platform's bottom line. It is not. The platforms pay out a contractually fixed percentage of revenue regardless of how the streams are distributed; the size of the pool does not change because some of the streams inside it are fraudulent. What changes is who gets the money. Every pound that a bot farm extracts is a pound that would otherwise have been shared among the artists whose work real human beings actually chose to play. The pro-rata pool, in effect, socialises the cost of fraud across the entire community of working musicians while privatising the proceeds to the fraudster.

The data-tracking firm Beatdapp, which specialises in detecting this activity, has estimated that streaming fraud removes around two billion dollars a year from the global music economy, with some estimates running as high as three billion. Beatdapp reckons that at least 10 per cent of all music streaming activity is fraudulent. As the firm's leadership has put it, the genius of the scheme is its granularity: “No one notices that a few pennies are going to this song and a few pennies are going to that song but, in aggregate, they can steal billions of dollars.” The dilution is invisible precisely because it is distributed. No single artist can point to the specific royalty that was taken from them, because it was never assigned to them in the first place. It simply never arrived.

There is a further wrinkle that compounds the harm, and it concerns the different kinds of royalty a single piece of music generates. One stream does not pay a single fee; it triggers several. There is the recording royalty, paid to whoever owns the master recording, which is the slice the platforms talk about most. But there is also a separate stream of songwriting royalties, split between the mechanical right, which compensates the reproduction of the composition, and the performance right, which compensates its public communication and is typically administered by the performing-rights organisations and collection societies that sit between the platforms and the people who actually wrote the songs. A fraudulent stream is not a single act of theft. It is a multiplier that propagates through every one of these layers at once, diluting the recording pool, the mechanical pool and the performance pool simultaneously. The session bassist, the topline writer and the producer who took points on the back end are all skimmed in the same fractional, untraceable motion. The plumbing that was built to make sure everyone who touched a song gets paid becomes, under fraud, the plumbing that makes sure everyone who touched a song gets quietly shortchanged.

The Already-Precarious Economics of Being a Musician

To grasp why this matters in human rather than abstract terms, you have to look at how little working musicians were earning before any of this began.

The figures are sobering. Spotify pays approximately 0.003 dollars per stream. Apple Music pays around 0.0075, and Tidal around 0.0125. At Spotify's rate, an artist needs roughly a thousand streams to earn three dollars. A survey of musicians' income found a median annual figure of just over 13,000 dollars, with one widely cited survey reporting a median income of 1,450 dollars from the activity it measured. Virtually every musician surveyed listed streaming royalties as one of their income streams, but only one in twenty full-time musicians listed streaming as their top source of income. The streaming royalty, for the working artist, is not a salary. It is a supplement, a trickle, a few hundred pounds here and there that nonetheless adds up to something meaningful when every income stream is thin.

Layered on top of this is one of the starkest inequalities in any creative industry. By common estimate, the top 1 per cent of artists capture something approaching 90 per cent of all streaming revenue, leaving the remaining 99 per cent to share what is left. The independent musician is therefore competing for a sliver of a sliver, and it is precisely that sliver that fraud erodes. The mega-star whose catalogue generates billions of legitimate streams will not notice that the per-stream rate has crept downward by a fraction of a penny. The session violinist on a niche jazz release, or the electronic producer with a devoted but small following, absolutely will. For them, the dilution caused by industrial fraud is a regressive tax, falling hardest on those least able to bear it.

The cruelty of the arrangement is that the people most exposed to the dilution are also the people least equipped to absorb it. A signed artist on a major label has tour support, sync licensing and an advance to fall back on. The independent musician without that infrastructure is the one for whom streaming income, however meagre, is closest to load-bearing, and the one with no recourse when it shrinks for reasons they cannot see. They will simply notice, if they notice at all, that the numbers never quite add up to what the play counts seemed to promise, and conclude, wrongly, that the fault is theirs for failing to find an audience.

This precarity has not gone unnoticed by lawmakers. In the United States, Representative Rashida Tlaib introduced the Living Wage for Musicians Act, designed to create a new streaming royalty that would guarantee artists a minimum of one penny per stream, an amount calculated to provide a working-class artist with a living wage. The bill, backed by the United Musicians and Allied Workers organisation, reflects a growing recognition that the current model leaves the people who actually make the music at the very bottom of a long queue. When fraud at industrial scale is allowed to sit on top of a structure this fragile, it does not merely steal money. It accelerates the hollowing-out of an entire tier of professional musicianship, the working middle class of the art form.

The Platforms Wake Up

The streaming services have not been idle, though their response has been uneven, belated, and in places quietly self-serving.

The most dramatic single statistic came from Spotify, which announced in 2025 that it had removed more than 75 million tracks it classed as spam from its platform over the preceding twelve months. The figure is so large it is almost difficult to parse: 75 million tracks is more music than most people could listen to in several lifetimes, deleted in a single year because it existed only to game the system. Alongside the purge, Spotify rolled out a suite of new policies: a spam filter designed to stop recommending mass-uploaded duplicates and tracks with manipulated metadata, and, from April 2026, a beta feature allowing artists to disclose how AI had been used in their work, with those credits appearing in the song's metadata.

Spotify's most consequential intervention, however, predated the AI panic and remains the most controversial. In its 2024 royalty overhaul, the company introduced a rule that a track must accumulate at least 1,000 streams in a rolling twelve-month period before it earns any royalties at all. It also began charging distributors a fee, set at the equivalent of around ten euros per track, when flagrant artificial streaming was detected on their content. The logic was straightforward: remove the economic incentive for low-volume fraud by making thousands of barely-streamed tracks worthless, and impose a financial cost on the intermediaries who deliver fraudulent material.

The trouble is that the 1,000-stream threshold does not only disqualify fraudsters. It disqualifies the genuine long tail, the real artists whose songs are streamed a few hundred times by a few hundred real listeners and who, under the new rule, now earn nothing from them. By one estimate, the policy removed roughly 40 million dollars a year from the smallest artists and redistributed it upward, toward artists above the threshold and toward the major-label pools. This is the recurring pattern in the industry's anti-fraud measures: the blunt instruments designed to deter the criminals also catch the most vulnerable legitimate participants in their teeth. A fix aimed at the bots ends up taking money from precisely the people the fraud was already hurting.

The Detection Arms Race

Underpinning every one of these policies is a technical problem that gets harder by the month: how do you tell a fraudulent stream from a real one, or a synthetic track from a human one, when both are designed specifically to be indistinguishable?

The fraud side has every advantage of asymmetry. A bot operator can route traffic through residential proxies and virtual private networks so that the streams appear to originate from thousands of ordinary homes in dozens of countries. They can vary the timing and duration of plays to mimic human listening rhythms, skipping some tracks, replaying others, pausing convincingly. They can spread activity across enough accounts and enough songs that no individual signal rises above the statistical floor. This is precisely the playbook Smith ran, and the reason it survived for seven years is that, executed with discipline, it produces a pattern almost identical to the messy, dispersed, low-engagement listening of a real long tail of obscure music.

The detection side has had to become correspondingly sophisticated. Specialist firms such as Beatdapp analyse streaming data at enormous scale, looking for the faint correlations that betray automation: clusters of accounts that were created together, that listen in suspiciously similar patterns, that share infrastructure fingerprints, that play catalogues no human would ever assemble. Detecting AI-generated audio is a separate and equally fraught challenge. Deezer built a system capable of identifying output from the most prolific generative models, including Suno and Udio, and by its own account had detected and tagged more than 13.4 million AI tracks across 2025. In early 2026 it began offering that detection capability to other companies, an implicit acknowledgement that no single platform can solve the problem alone and that detection is becoming a shared utility, almost an industry-wide immune system.

But detection is a moving target, and the asymmetry favours the attacker permanently. Each new generative model produces audio with slightly different statistical fingerprints, and each improvement in realism narrows the gap the detectors are looking for. A research finding cited by Deezer, drawn from a study it conducted with the polling firm Ipsos, captured the stakes starkly: in blind listening, AI-generated music fooled 97 per cent of listeners, who could not reliably tell it from human work. If human ears are that easily deceived, the burden falls entirely on machine detection, and machine detection is locked in exactly the kind of adversarial escalation that has no stable equilibrium. Every detector that works becomes, the moment it is deployed, a training signal the next generation of fraudsters can optimise against.

Deezer's Different Bet

If Spotify's approach has been to police the pool while leaving its basic structure intact, the French service Deezer has made a more radical set of choices, and in doing so has become the closest thing the industry has to a working laboratory for the alternatives.

Deezer became, in mid-2025, the first and for a long time only major platform to explicitly tag AI-generated music, labelling tracks so that listeners can see what they are being served. Critically, Deezer pairs detection with demonetisation: it has reported demonetising up to 85 per cent of AI-generated music streams flagged as fraudulent, cutting off the financial oxygen rather than merely flagging the content. This distinction matters more than it first appears. A label that says “AI-generated” informs the listener but does nothing to stop a bot, which neither reads labels nor cares. Demonetisation, by contrast, attacks the only thing the fraudster actually wants, which is the money, and removes it from the equation regardless of how convincingly the streams have been disguised.

Deezer has also been the most committed adopter of an alternative to the pro-rata pool itself. Under the user-centric, or fan-centric, model, your subscription fee is not poured into a communal pot. Instead, after the platform takes its cut, your money is divided only among the artists you personally listened to. If you pay ten pounds a month and play nothing but a single independent band, that band receives your money, rather than a thousandth of a penny filtered through a pool dominated by global superstars and, potentially, bot farms.

The appeal of this model in the context of fraud is structural rather than cosmetic. Under a true user-centric system, a bot farm streaming phantom tracks can only ever redistribute the subscription fees of the fake accounts it controls. It cannot reach into the subscription of a real listener who never played its songs. The fraud is quarantined to the fraudster's own accounts rather than diluting the entire pool. Studies suggest user-centric distribution would shift somewhere between 1 and 5 per cent of total payouts away from the major-label-dominated top and toward independent and niche artists. Deezer's own data from its first year on the fan-centric model showed that professional artists with active, engaged fanbases saw their payouts rise by up to 20 per cent.

No model is a panacea, and the user-centric approach has its own complications around accounting, fan behaviour and the disproportionate power it hands to a listener's single most-played artist. A determined fraudster could still pay for genuine subscriptions and stream their own catalogue within those accounts, recovering some portion of the fee they paid in. But the crucial difference is that under user-centric distribution the fraud can no longer be a profit centre, because the most a fraudster can recoup is a fraction of money they themselves put in. The incentive that powers the entire enterprise, the ability to extract value created by everyone else's listening, simply disappears. Deezer's experiment demonstrates something the rest of the industry has been reluctant to admit: that the vulnerability to industrial fraud is not an unfortunate accident of streaming. It is a direct consequence of a specific design decision, the communal pool, that could be changed.

So Who Is Actually Responsible?

This is the question that the Michael Smith case, and the broader phenomenon it represents, forces into the open. When AI enables fraud at industrial scale inside the very systems artists depend on to be paid, the responsibility does not sit neatly with any single party. It is smeared across the whole chain, and each link has a credible claim that the problem belongs to someone else.

Consider the generative AI companies first. Tools like Suno and Udio did not invent streaming fraud, and the overwhelming majority of their users are not criminals. But the marginal cost of music production they have driven to near zero is the single factor that turned a niche hustle into an industrial pipeline. A company that makes it trivially cheap to manufacture unlimited plausible tracks has, at minimum, a duty to consider what those tracks will be used for, and to support the detection and labelling efforts that would let platforms distinguish synthetic mass-uploads from human work. The case of Smith's alleged supplier, who provided thousands of tracks a month while reportedly believing his customer was legitimate, illustrates exactly how easily that duty can be sidestepped through plausible deniability.

The platforms bear a different kind of responsibility. They own the pool, they set the rules, they take their percentage, and they alone possess the data to detect the fraud at scale. Their recent measures, the 75 million takedowns, the stream thresholds, the AI labelling, are real and substantial. But the fact that these defences arrived only after the fraud had reached billions of dollars suggests an institution that tolerated the problem while it was profitable to do so, since fraudulent streams still count toward the engagement metrics and subscriber numbers that platforms tout to investors. And the persistent tendency of their fixes to penalise small legitimate artists alongside the criminals raises the suspicion that the cheapest solutions, rather than the fairest ones, are the ones being chosen.

The collection societies and performing-rights organisations that administer royalties have a role too, as the gatekeepers who validate which rights holders get paid and who pass the songwriting royalties through to composers. So do the distributors who deliver tracks to platforms, now increasingly being made to bear a financial cost for the fraud they pass along. And then there is the structure of the pro-rata pool itself, which is less a responsible party than a responsible design, a system whose central feature is that it makes everyone's earnings hostage to everyone else's honesty. Regulators and lawmakers, who have so far engaged with the precarity of musicians' incomes through measures like the Living Wage for Musicians Act but have barely begun to grapple with synthetic fraud, complete the picture of a problem that is everyone's concern and therefore, conveniently, no one's mandate.

What is striking is how much of the cost of this distributed irresponsibility lands on the people with the least power to assign blame. The independent musician cannot audit the pool. They cannot see whose phantom streams diluted their quarterly payment, or by how much, or demand redress. The Beatdapp principle holds in reverse: just as no one notices the few pennies being skimmed from each song, no artist can ever prove the few pennies that were skimmed from theirs. The harm is real, measurable in aggregate, and individually invisible. That combination, real damage with no traceable victim, is precisely what makes the fraud so durable and so corrosive.

What a Real Fix Would Require

The genuinely difficult truth is that no single intervention solves this, and the most effective interventions are the ones the industry has been slowest to embrace because they redistribute power rather than merely policing the edges.

Detection and labelling, of the kind Deezer has pioneered and Spotify has begun to adopt, are necessary but insufficient. They make the synthetic visible, which matters, but tagging a track as AI-generated does nothing on its own to stop a bot from streaming it. Detection becomes meaningful only when it is paired with demonetisation, the cutting-off of fraudulent streams from the pool, which is the harder and more contentious step because it requires the platform to make confident judgements about which streams are real, and to accept the legal and reputational risk of occasionally getting it wrong.

The criminal route, exemplified by the prosecution of Michael Smith, is a genuine deterrent but a limited one. Smith faces up to five years in prison, with sentencing scheduled for July 2026, and agreed to forfeit more than eight million dollars. His case sends a message that the largest, most brazen schemes can attract the attention of the FBI. But a single prosecution, however historic, cannot scale to meet a phenomenon producing 75,000 synthetic tracks a day on one platform alone. The fraud is automated; the enforcement is artisanal. It took years of investigation to build one case against one unusually visible operator, and there is no version of that process that keeps pace with an adversary who can spin up a new catalogue in an afternoon.

That leaves the structural option, the one that Deezer's experiment keeps pointing toward: changing how the money is divided in the first place. A move toward user-centric or fan-centric distribution would not eliminate fraud, but it would fundamentally change its mathematics, confining a fraudster's gains to the accounts they actually control rather than letting them tax the entire community. Combined with credible disclosure requirements for AI-generated content, robust demonetisation of detected fraud, and policies that protect rather than penalise the genuine long tail, it represents the only approach that addresses the disease rather than the symptom.

What all of these have in common is that they require the most powerful players, the platforms and the major labels who benefit most from the status quo, to accept structural changes that would shift money toward the independent artists currently absorbing the losses. That, more than any technical obstacle, is the real barrier. The pro-rata pool is not a law of nature. It is a choice, made decades ago for administrative convenience, that has turned out to carry a catastrophic flaw in an age when both the music and the listeners can be manufactured for free.

Smith read fake comments aloud at his lakeside home because he wanted to feel like the star the market had never let him become. He found a way to extract the rewards of an audience without the inconvenience of earning one, and for seven years the architecture of the streaming economy let him. The architecture is the story. The bots and the AI songs are merely what happens when you build a shared pool, fill it with everyone's livelihood, and then make it cheaper to fake the water than to actually swim. The working musicians draining their slice of that pool, penny by invisible penny, never agreed to share it with the phantoms. They simply have no way to prove the phantoms were ever there.

References

1. United States Department of Justice, Southern District of New York, “North Carolina Man Pleads Guilty To Music Streaming Fraud Aided By Artificial Intelligence”, March 2026. https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/north-carolina-man-pleads-guilty-music-streaming-fraud-aided-artificial-intelligence-0
2. Rolling Stone, “'Fake as F-ck': The Wannabe Rock Star Accused of Scamming Streamers”, 2024. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/streaming-fraud-fake-streams-mike-smith-1235500686/
3. Rolling Stone, “Mike Smith Pleads Guilty to AI-Assisted Music-Streaming Fraud”, March 2026. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/mike-smith-guilty-ai-generated-music-streaming-fraud-1235534089/
4. The Hollywood Reporter, “North Carolina Man to Pay $8 Million After Pleading Guilty In First-Ever Streaming Fraud Case”, March 2026. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/music/music-news/north-carolina-pleads-guilty-in-first-streaming-fraud-case-1236541593/
5. Billboard, “Feds Score Guilty Plea in First-Ever U.S. Streaming Fraud Case, An $8M Scheme Aided by AI Music”, March 2026. https://www.billboard.com/pro/ai-song-streaming-fraud-musician-pleads-guilty-stealing/
6. Fortune, “A musician siphoned $10 million in royalties after using AI to create hundreds of thousands of songs, streaming them billions of times”, 5 September 2024. https://fortune.com/2024/09/05/ai-artificial-intelligence-music-fraud-conspiracy-michael-smith-royalties/
7. Music Business Worldwide, “Streaming fraud man who pocketed $8m using hundreds of thousands of AI songs streamed billions of times by bots pleads guilty”, March 2026. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/streaming-fraud-man-who-pocketed-8m-using-hundreds-of-thousands-of-ai-songs-streamed-billions-of-times-by-bots-pleads-guilty/
8. Deezer Newsroom, “AI-generated tracks now represent 44% of all new uploaded music”, April 2026. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2026/04/ai-generated-tracks-represent-44-of-new-uploaded-music/
9. Mixmag, “Deezer says it has demonetised 85% of all AI-generated music due to fraud”, 2026. https://mixmag.net/read/deezer-says-demonetised-85-percent-ai-generated-music-fraud-news
10. Music Week, “Inside the industry's streaming fraud response as Deezer now logs 75,000 AI-based tracks per day”, 2026. https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/inside-the-industry-s-streaming-fraud-response-as-deezer-now-logs-75-000-ai-based-tracks-per-day/093982
11. Deezer Newsroom, “Deezer and Ipsos study: AI fools 97% of listeners”, November 2025. https://newsroom-deezer.com/2025/11/deezer-ipsos-survey-ai-music/
12. Music Business Worldwide, “Spotify has deleted 75m+ tracks in 'spammy' AI music crackdown”, September 2025. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-has-deleted-75m-spammy-tracks-as-it-unveils-new-ai-music-policies/
13. The Hollywood Reporter, “Spotify Removes 75 Million Spam Songs, Cracks Down on AI 'Bad Actors'”, September 2025. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/spotify-new-ai-policies-spam-filter-enforcement-1236379926/
14. Spotify Newsroom, “Spotify Strengthens AI Protections for Artists, Songwriters, and Producers”, 25 September 2025. https://newsroom.spotify.com/2025-09-25/spotify-strengthens-ai-protections/
15. Music Business Worldwide, “Streaming fraud costs the global music industry $2bn a year, according to Beatdapp”, 2024. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/streaming-fraud-costs-the-global-music-industry-2bn-a-year-according-to-beatdapp-now-its-partnering-with-beatport-to-combat-the-trend/
16. EDM.com, “Beatport and Beatdapp Partner to Combat Annual Streaming Fraud of Up to $3 Billion”, 2024. https://edm.com/industry/beatport-beatdapp-partnership-combat-3-billion-annual-streaming-fraud/
17. Curve Royalty Systems, “Pro Rata Vs User Centric Streaming Model: The Streaming Royalty Debate”. https://www.curveroyaltysystems.com/news/pro-rata-vs-user-centric-streaming-model
18. Music Business Worldwide, “Spotify is changing its royalty model to crush streaming fraud and introduce a minimum threshold for payment”, 2023. https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/spotify-is-changing-its-royalty-model-to-crush-streaming-fraud/
19. Digital Music News, “Rashida Tlaib Introduces New Bill to Fix Streaming Royalties”, 6 March 2024. https://www.digitalmusicnews.com/2024/03/06/rashida-tlaib-streaming-royalties-bill-umaw/
20. United Musicians and Allied Workers, “Make Streaming Pay”. https://weareumaw.org/make-streaming-pay
21. Two Story Media, “The Average Musician Made $13,327 in 2024”. https://twostorymedia.com/musician-income-report/
22. The Wash, “Playing for pennies: How streaming royalties leave independent artists struggling”, 6 December 2024. https://thewash.org/2024/12/06/playing-for-pennies-how-streaming-royalties-leave-independent-artists-struggling/
23. Help Net Security, “Fake AI songs streamed billions of times, netting fraudster $10 million”, 20 March 2026. https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2026/03/20/ai-music-streaming-fraud-guilty-plea/

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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In Summary: * “It. Is. Baseball Time. In. Texas.” Opening words always spoken to start a particular segment of the Texas Rangers Pregame Show. Settles my mind when I hear them.

Spent 2 hours this morning at yard work: mowing, chopping down weeds, carrying and breaking limbs and branches, all in the front yard. Heat index was already over 100 degrees out there when I quit and came inside. Really want to do more mowing tomorrow, but I may have to put that off until Thursday, depending on how I feel in the morning after I start moving around.

Shall work on the night prayers during tonight's ball game, and turn in early.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 238.87 lbs. * bp= 140/85 (76)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 05:40 – 1 banana * 06:40 – 1 big breakfast taco * 12:30 – mashed potatoes, beef patties with mushroom gravy * 16:45 – HEB Bakery cookie

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:15 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:35 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 09:00 – 11:00 – yard work, mowing, chopping down weeds, carying and breaking limbs and branches, all in the front yard * 11:30 – follow news reports from various sources * 13:30 – listening to relaxing music. * 15:00 – listening to general sports talk on 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station.

Chess: * 16:00 – moved in all pending CC games

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Ukraine Path

I was fitted for wonder And grew a giant tree To aging assault A final eviction Thoughts for the unaccord- in the sympathy of day And pestilence We were worried at last That things will be final core And striking the salute Our prayer ambulance

And in this country, the gentry Small arms for the government A tour of the Lord For the singers that be And brominated time Bees to our cast And solely then Did we strike with reason

And pain disappeared For the other mistakes of high fever But Bertolli was new And masses of St. Catherine Made verse to the public

And this day off in reason here Fighting advanced of the forged And to solely forget That we are- still,- The Mother of Time

And in this Eucharist Is the body of Jesus And we came unafraid But to be together For these constant plans And days and things- of a fresh balloon And in Singh rapport We are fighting till ten Keeping merry To solve away our public cure And in this instance to Aberdeen We sat up with the Sun- to make a stand and decision That we were going to Rome,- Federal or not To shake this war- into a barrel.

1. 18. Juni

Endlich! So würde ich diesen Tag nennen. Genau dieses Gefühl beschreibt ihn am besten. Und es ist schon ganz klar, dass es dabei um unsere endlich gelöste Unterkunftssituation geht. Aber fangen wir von Vorne an. Am Morgen haben wir mit Imke über die Pflanzen und Gerüche in Berlin gesprochen, und ich möchte hier meine Eindrücke dazu festhalten. Eigentlich habe ich das bei meinen früheren Besuchen in Berlin nicht so deutlich wahrgenommen, aber Berlin ist unglaublich vielfältig in seinen Gerüchen. Die Stadt riecht einfach sehr unterschiedlich – besonders jetzt, wo endlich Sommer ist. Am deutlichsten erkenne ich den Duft der Linden. Imke hat mir auch von anderen Pflanzen erzählt, die sie beim Fahrradfahren bemerkt: Birken, Brombeersträucher und viele andere blühende Stauden. Und ich habe das tatsächlich auch deutlich gespürt. In anderen Großstädten habe ich so etwas noch nicht erlebt. Selbst neben diesem riesigen Verkehrschaos bleiben die Grünheit und die Lebendigkeit der Pflanzen spürbar. Besonders der Duft der Linden ist für mich unglaublich nostalgisch. Er erinnert mich an schöne Erinnerungen und an sehr liebe Erfahrungen. Nach langer Zeit habe ich dieses Gefühl wieder in Berlin erlebt. Nicht alle Gerüche in Berlin sind allerdings so angenehm. Viele Bahnhöfe, die wir bisher besucht haben, riechen nach Urin. Irgendwie sind fast alle Eingänge, Ausgänge und Zwischengänge in den U- und S-Bahnhöfen von diesem Geruch geprägt. Ich persönlich würde so etwas sogar in Wegbeschreibungen für blinde Tourist*innen erwähnen, aber darüber bin ich mir mit meiner Chefin noch nicht ganz einig. Auf jeden Fall liebe ich dieses Berlin, das so unterschiedlich riecht und so unterschiedlich klingt. Besonders heute – an dem Tag, an dem wir nach der Arbeit endlich eine Unterkunft gefunden haben!

Es war inzwischen schon fast eine Tradition geworden, nach der Zeit in Schöneweide mögliche Hotels oder sogar Pensionen zu besuchen und dort nach freien Zimmern zu fragen. Manchmal sehen wir auf Booking, dass ein Preis für uns eigentlich passend wäre, trauen uns aber trotzdem nicht zu buchen, weil wir keine Ahnung haben, wie das Badezimmer dort aussieht. Mit den Tieren ist es noch einmal eine ganz eigene Geschichte. Ich dachte eigentlich, dass Hunde in Berlin besonders willkommen sind. Aber die Gebühren für Hunde werden, vor allem bei längeren Aufenthalten, schnell sehr hoch. Ein schönes Hotel am Flughafen verlangt zum Beispiel 12 Euro pro Hund pro Nacht! Dabei bekommt der Hund weder ein eigenes Bett noch irgendeinen besonderen Service. Wenn man das zusammenrechnet – 12 × 2 × 55 Nächte –, kommt da eine enorme Summe heraus. Nur für die Hunde wären das über 1300 Euro! Was mich beim Thema Hunde außerdem überrascht hat: Vor vielen Läden gibt es keine Stellen, an denen man sie sicher anbinden könnte, damit sie auf ihre Besitzer warten. Deshalb müssen wir oft Fahrradständer benutzen, aber das ist natürlich nicht immer ideal.

Dann haben wir aber noch einmal beim Hotel am Tierpark nachgefragt, das uns inzwischen wirklich ans Herz gewachsen ist. Außerdem haben wir herausgefunden, dass Erasmus uns doch noch zusätzlich unterstützt, und das hat in diesem Fall sehr geholfen. Da die Gesamtsumme für einen Monat im Hotel für uns dadurch machbar wurde, haben wir beschlossen, auch die restlichen Tage dort zu verbringen. Eigentlich hatten wir unsere Reservierung im bisherigen Hotel noch bis Sonntag. Aber mit dem kaputten Aufzug wollten wir dort nicht länger bleiben. Und dann erfuhren wir plötzlich, dass wir schon morgen umziehen können. Das war eine so große Erleichterung, dass es uns sofort wieder mit Freude erfüllt hat. Deshalb bleibt von diesem Tag für mich vor allem genau dieses Gefühl. Obwohl ich heute auch viel Zeit in meinen Online-Tagebuchblog investiert habe. Ich würde sagen: Wenn man mit einem Screenreader arbeitet, ist es gar nicht so einfach, die richtige Plattform für Online-Schreiben zu finden. Aber mal sehen, wie gut ich mit write.as zurechtkomme. Alle Vorschläge fürs Online-Blogschreiben bekomme ich von meinem Genossen ChatGPT. Bear Blog würde ich auch noch gern ausprobieren, aber im Moment bin ich zeitlich ein bisschen festgefahren. Im Moment klingt jedenfalls wieder alles möglich – jetzt, wo wir endlich keine Obdachlosen mehr in Berlin sind!

I do not think the worst things that happened to me made me better.

That feels important to say plainly. Pain is not a craftsman. Cruelty is not a teacher deserving gratitude. Shame did not arrive with wisdom hidden inside it. It arrived as shame. It took what was soft and young and private, and it put its hands where they did not belong.

But I was there too.

That is the part I keep returning to.

I was there before the wound. I was there during it. I was there after it, carrying what no one came to lift from me, and somewhere inside all that carrying, certain parts of me did not die. They changed shape. They learned to move quietly. They learned when to hide, when to speak, when to become funny, when to become useful, when to become still. But they did not die.

The garden did not make me someone who hides from life. It made me someone who knows that a hidden place can be holy when the open world has become unsafe. I went there because I had already learned that being seen could be dangerous. I went there because the laughter of other children could follow a body like weather. I went there because adults could be near enough to hear and still not arrive.

And yet, in that garden, something in me kept looking.

That is maybe the first true thing about me. Even when I was trying not to be found, I was still looking. At leaves. At light. At the small proof that the world had not become entirely cruel. I was not only hiding from pain; I was studying beauty, though I would not have had those words then. A frightened child under trees, saving evidence.

That is still what I do.

I save evidence.

I notice the slight change in a face when someone is about to lie. I notice the careful brightness people use when they are trying not to cry. I notice the joke that arrives half a second too quickly, the tenderness someone disguises as sarcasm, the silence that is not peace but fear wearing clean clothes. I notice when someone is performing strength because I have performed it so often myself.

People think being perceptive is a gift, and sometimes it is. Sometimes it feels like standing in a room full of lit matches, knowing which one will burn down the house before anyone else smells smoke.

I learned to read people because I had to. In classrooms, in corridors, in changing rooms, in all the places where boyhood pretended to be harmless while sharpening itself on anyone different. I was gay before the word could hold me kindly. Before it became identity, before it became pride, before it became anything I could stand inside without flinching, it was already a weapon in other people's mouths. They knew enough to wound me before I knew enough to defend myself.

So I read them.

I read laughter. I read footsteps. I read who was bored enough to become cruel. I read which adults would look away and which ones might not. I read the room before I entered it because entering without reading had already cost me too much.

That is still in me. I can see behind a facade because I lived behind one. I know the labour of appearing fine while something private is bleeding through the floor. I know how much can be hidden inside a normal answer. “I'm okay” can mean I am okay. It can also mean please do not ask, because if you ask kindly I may not survive the kindness.

This is why I see people.

Not in the shallow way people say it when they mean they are observant. I see the defended places. I see the child still waiting behind the adult. I see pain when it has learned manners. I see joy too, which matters more than people think. Joy is often the more hidden thing. Pain announces itself eventually, but joy is shy after a life of being punished. It appears in flashes: a real smile before the mask returns, a softened voice, a look that says something got through.

I see those moments and I keep them.

Maybe that is why I give.

Some people might say I give too much. They would not always be wrong. There have been doors I should have left closed. There have been people whose wounds became visible enough for me to excuse the harm they were doing. There have been times when I mistook understanding someone for being responsible for them, and hope, stubborn little idiot that it is, kept handing me reasons to stay.

But I do not give because I am empty.

I give because my heart did not become mean.

That is not a small thing.

After the garden, after the classrooms, after the changing room, after the rumours, after the silence in the car, there was every reason for something in me to turn hard and stay hard. There was every reason to become careful with love, to count every gesture, to ration warmth like wartime bread. There was every reason to say: no more, nothing leaves this heart unless the world proves it deserves it first.

But that is not what happened.

I became careful, yes. Watchful, yes. Exhausted, often. But not ungenerous. Not hollow. Not hateful.

The changing room should have taught me that bodies are only danger. It did teach me some of that, for a long time. It taught me that shame can be forced onto you and then treated as if it came from you. It taught me that boys can do terrible things while pretending they are only joking. It taught me that the world can keep ringing its bells after something inside you has been humiliated beyond language.

But even there, even after that, I did not stop wanting tenderness.

That almost breaks my heart to admit.

Something in me still wanted touch to mean care. Still wanted being wanted to mean being cherished. Still wanted love to be clean enough to enter without fear. That longing followed me into later rooms, including the camp, where secrecy dressed itself as intimacy and I was young enough, lonely enough, hopeful enough to believe it.

I was not foolish for wanting love.

I was wounded.

There is a difference.

The army taught me what happens when someone wants the warmth of you but not the responsibility of having touched your life. It taught me that people can hide behind duty, rank, masculinity, procedure, silence. It taught me that a person can be close enough to your breaking to drive you toward help and still not offer one human sentence to sit beside you in the dark.

That silence is one of the things I still measure the world against.

Maybe that is why honesty matters so much to me. Because I know what silence can do. I know what happens when people choose comfort over truth, image over care, distance over decency. I know how a lie can enter a room and rearrange everyone except the person it harms. I know the particular cruelty of being discussed, reduced, misnamed, turned into a story by people who were never brave enough to know you.

So I tell the truth.

Sometimes too much. Sometimes too directly. Sometimes before the room is ready. Sometimes before I am protected enough to survive the consequences. But I would rather be wounded by truth than slowly erased by pretending. I have lived inside too many unsaid things. I have watched silence put on a uniform and call itself responsibility. I have watched shame become gossip because no one had the courage to name tenderness honestly.

I cannot live like that.

My honesty is not a performance of virtue. It is a refusal to abandon myself in the old way. It is the voice I did not have in the garden. It is the sentence I could not say in the classroom. It is the witness that did not arrive in the changing room. It is the word that never came in the car.

I give from the same place.

From the heart, yes, and not lightly. I know people can misuse that. I know some will take warmth as permission, generosity as supply, forgiveness as weakness, patience as proof that they do not have to change. I know this because I have let people stay too long in rooms inside me. I have made beautiful excuses for people who were only offering me fragments. I have called it hope when sometimes it was grief refusing to pack.

But still, I would rather learn boundaries than lose my heart.

That is the line I am trying to live now.

Not less love. Truer love.

Not less seeing. Clearer seeing.

Not less giving. Giving that does not require me to disappear.

Because I am not only the boy who hid. I am also the man who can see. I am not only the body that was shamed. I am also the heart that stayed tender. I am not only the young man abandoned into silence. I am also the voice that finally tells the truth.

And maybe that is the most devastating thing.

Not that I survived.

People survive all kinds of things because the body keeps going before the soul has agreed. Survival by itself is not the miracle. The miracle is that after everything, I can still look at another person and want to understand them. I can still see joy. I can still give. I can still love. I can still be honest. I can still be funny in the dark. I can still make meaning from fragments. I can still find the small hidden light and say: there, that stayed.

No one stopped the day.

But neither did they stop me.

Hoping for a repeat of last night's win.

Tuned in now to 105.3 The Fan, DFW's #1 Sports Station listening to general sports talk ahead of the pregame show for tonight's MLB Game: the Texas Rangers vs the Miami Marlins. The opening pitch is scheduled for 5:40 PM CDT. I'll stay here for the radio call of the game as broadcast over MLB's Gameday Service.

Last night's 4 to 3 Rangers win over the Marlins was so nice. Sure would like a repeat of that tonight.

And the adventure continues.

Sullen Win

And on this day we will Flighting aware in rise The simple of hand and ecstasy Fortunes of year And times to know and be redeemed The different forms of day And nights of the amend All that was is still welcome And everything now is vast to know Burlington strength in those we see Pensions for our own and then This country of his will- The penny stops in literal Blinding but not unlike With mustering code Stops of road to hillcrest Nights of no pain and high North The planet we seed is aware A plane to craze you And capture all amends To cure and forthright Diamonds at the envy Limit to our cause Six deletions of all war And betting on that we are peace A fantom paralegal And evidence subsist Our demand in starglow Portions freer and in demand What kept busy is two for the isle In citizen wonder and no collect The different wonder as our way Our stations in state Little bits of blight to wean That capture all of ten Carling’s most and can The able will meet And rise all men For then to have this play And as we are, manifest in field The Heavens befriend us And meeting Christ on our path The year can wait- four seconds more To bliss and the early rise Mayhem for our shore- if only drifted much The heart in early joy And therefore long Night’s befriend And blushing as before Hue to our labour And marking code Money to the filling World And all this window of Hers- Continuous and fair ploy Of speed and early chance We meet the other neighbour- across his sole reaction That there is no enemy in this house And treasure near For unto you,- I offer you my hand Lifting rise Beyond the early rise But four days in plight Testing the age to know- that time is on our map And may be, the greatest hue.

21 June 2026

Saw Shao Fan's show Refrain | 复沓 at White Cube this morning—wonderful work. First time in a while that such large paintings have felt justified. Deep sensitivity in all aspects, a practice of looking and re-looking, and a lived engagement with antiquity that generates work with an intensity that truly honors his subjects both human and nonhuman. There are a few stunners, but Fruit 1924 (2024) and Rabbit Portrait 1025 (2025)—both large ink on rice paper works—are with me the most right now. Fruit has an almost paper-like two-dimensionality; it's an apple sliced in half to reveal a core that becomes a network of overlapping planes and openings. Starts to become a skull-like memento mori the longer you look at it. Rabbit manages to achieve an unflinchingly direct and confrontational quality through symmetry without locking itself off in any way (which is something that usually doesn't sit well with me)—the odd strands of hair/whiskers whimsically trail off beyond their defining limits, and certain elements like the white of the rabbit's ears remain true to the eye rather than an ideal, so my feeling is that the impressive balance comes more from an endearing emotional groundedness than a technical fastidiousness.

In all the kinds of music I enjoy it often happens that I’ll grow to appreciate second-tier productions as much as (if not more than) those generally agreed to be ground-breaking masterpieces. There’s so much to love in what is ‘merely’ excellent music that comes to us less unencumbered with expectation & significance than the canonical Great Works. My latest classical acquisitions have both been in that vein: an album of The Complete Piano Trios of the Czech-born and later French-resident composer Anton Reicha, and a first volume of the Complete String Quartets of Alexander Glazunov which features the Russian's 3rd & 5th quartets.

I wrote a little about Reicha on one of my previous blogs. His output is sometimes simplistically divided between a more eccentric and experimental phase earlier in his career when he worked in Germany and Austria; and a more soberly decorous one after he settled in France. His set of six op. 101 piano trios (1824) belong to the latter, and, indeed they are graceful and mellifluous pieces relatively light on drama & intensity. The fourth trio does perhaps have a little more in the way of Teutonic sturm und drang than the others. Another one that stands out is the second – the only one in a minor key – and also the only one of the set I’d heard before. Very few people had ever heard all of them before as this is the first ever recording of numbers four to six. It's the kind of music that can serve as an agreeable sonic backdrop while reading a book, for example, with moments now and again that will undemonstratively demand (and reward) more engaged attention. The performances, by the Trio Bohémo, and the recording, are beautifully done.

I’d heard very little of Glazunov's music until recently, when I followed up an on-line recommendation to listen to his 3rd string quartet (1886-88). A while elapsed before I obtained it on CD – with performances by the Utrecht Quartet. It's a very appealing piece with strong melodies, especially in the Alla Mazurka part of its third movement. The fifth quartet (1898) is also very good, if less emotive. Again I can't fault the playing or the recorded sound.

---

In books it was another poetry-heavy week. I finished a volume of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo and another of the Selected Poems of Attila József. Both were poets who had to struggle against poverty, health problems, & adversity in general. József's life of tragic hardship came to an end under the wheels of a train in December '37. He was 32. In April of the following year Vallejo, in exile from his native Peru, succumbed to a mystery illness in a Paris hospital. He was 46.

Clayton Eshleman's translations in the Vallejo volume are the fruits of a lifelong vocation, and have been done full justice by the University of California Press. They impress even where the poems are obscure to the point of incomprehensibility. Enough meaning does shine through, overall, to make the effort of reading them seem a worthwhile endeavour. Peter Hargitai's translations of József, on the other hand, have had to make do with much less lavish treatment in a print-on-demand volume that could have used a little more editorial attention than it received. The translations are still strong, however. Both Eshleman and Hargitai understandably (being Americans) use American colloquialisms in their translations. I'm not sure why those sometimes felt jarring to me in the context of József's poems where they didn't in Vallejo's – some prejudice stemming from my Britishness perhaps.

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Stationery news: I treated myself to a Kaweco AL Sport fountain pen on Saturday, specifically one with the ‘Anthracite’ finish and a medium steel nib. Several times I’ve been tempted by the pens on display at The Art Shop in Abergavenny, and this time I finally succumbed. I could have acquired the same item more cheaply on-line, but the Art Shop is a local business I’m happy to support.

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Another enervating heatwave is in effect, due to peak over the coming two days, with temperatures forecast to reach 37C on Thursday.

19 June 2026

Attempted a painting today based on the fragmented reflection of a plane on wet tarmac that I saw while boarding a recent flight from London to Venice. Primed the panel with a left-to-right gradient from a bright yellow to a dense black—the idea was to then slowly layer loose/thin form lines over the gradient from bottom to top in a relatively monochrome gray-blue palette and see what rhythms and shapes cohered as the whole thing took on a sense of motion. An okay idea, but it just didn't work, probably because it was too determined. Having a practice means constantly rewriting one's own rules, and it feels like I've done a bit of over-defining in recent days that made me rigid in my approach. So it's time for a break from the studio for a while in the interest of recalibration and refocusing.

But what I can say now, for when I resume, is that there needs to be some kind of reckoning as far as my handling of color and its relationship to the logic I've been discovering. Destruction as well as building, (while it now feels overly representative to me almost eight months later), is perhaps a good work to go back to. That one set a baseline for accumulated tactility in conjunction with early watercolor layers that are constantly shifting underneath and weaving in and out of the topmost oil layers so that there's an optical softness even with clarity of form. And when I think about the work I now want to make, which is work that is free to break away from my visual references by way of every formal element considered in a delimitation stack while still remaining true to an invisible structure of observed logic, that might be a place to restart. Forms that float, reorganize themselves and react to each other, cause friction between background and foreground as well as flatness and depth, and ultimately create a self-regenerating mesh of lived-in experience and presence. Now I'll forget everything I just said.

The sun is out and the walk to the Old Port is warm and inviting. Recently I’ve been drawn to this bench that faces the river, the Grand Quai tower, and Habitat 67. This is my favourite part of the summer: mostly sunny, about 20 degrees, people out with their dogs and their coffees and their tote bags, crossing runners in short shorts with the light eastward breeze pushing through their hair.

The river’s surface is calm, sparkling in the sun.

Fitting: to my far right, a Canadian flag flutters in the wind, asserting its ownership over these stolen Indigenous lands and these waters that hold the remnants of my ancestors.

It was always a lie. I know this because we are still here.

I am still here. Still sitting in the sun on a Tuesday morning with nowhere to be but in the present moment.

Le soleil entaille la brume en faisant un bruit d'usine. Sur la route en terre trottine une file indienne de tourterelles des bois. En bas, un bout de planche sur un reste d'eau qui, plus loin, devient souterraine, fait passer la ravine et remonter [vers soi]. On entend le rire acide et cruel d'un martin-chasseur (Halcyon senegalensis) et quelques notes flutées de bulbuls communs. Le soleil coupe déjà la peau. On ne sait avec précision en quelle saison nous sommes, [le soi, perplexe, se taisant, rendu après la nuit incapable de discerner à même sa propre peau sous le soleil]. Qui coupe pourtant. Le jour et la nuit sont des couteaux qui tranchent le temps dans la cervelle. Il y a des nuages, petits et grands, ou le gris lumineux d’une plaque de fer, comme un écran. [Le soi, distant du ciel, regarde à ses pieds les trous, les ornières, où s’accrochent toutes sortes de choses résiduelles.] Malgré toutes ces choses [en soi, dans la tête, délavées par les pluies], l’on suit un itinéraire grâce au numérotage des rues, qui fait du trou de la ville un livre décousu.

Personne [à part les jambes, les pieds du soi, qui l’écrivent pas à pas] ne lit ce livre ou seulement le feuillette, ni le prononce à mi-voix, dont les pages s’énumèrent au gré du mouvement des populations, des errances particulières ou des ballades au bois. Plutôt : c’est une lecture mécaniquement inconsciente, en même temps que perpétuelle (il y a toujours au moins quelqu’un qui marche, de jour des milliers, sur les chapitres de la nuit) et chaotique, mais aussi déterminée par les points de départ et les points d’arrivée fixés idéiquement par les services d’une administration elle-même désordonnée. Déterminée en principe, car l’on ne parvient pas encore à faire aller les gens de A à B. Le livre de la ville échappe à toute imposition du plan.

Personne [à part les jambes, les pieds du soi, qui l’écrivent pas à pas] ne lit ce livre ou seulement le feuillette, ni le prononce à mi-voix, dont les pages s’énumèrent au gré du mouvement des populations, des errances particulières ou des ballades au bois. Plutôt : c’est une lecture mécaniquement inconsciente, en même temps que perpétuelle (il y a toujours au moins quelqu’un qui marche, de jour des milliers, sur les chapitres de la nuit) et chaotique, mais aussi déterminée par les points de départ et les points d’arrivée fixés idéiquement par les services d’une administration elle-même désordonnée. Déterminée en principe, car l’on ne parvient pas encore à faire aller les gens de A à B. Le livre de la ville échappe à toute imposition du plan.

#Fenêtresurville #Didascalies

The Long Journey to Finish a Three Novelette Trilogy Series

Note: This article is written for my Ernest Ortiz Writes Now Substack. But you have the chance to read it before they do.

It seems like a long time ago. Every 6 a.m., I sat in my Toyota Camry outside someone’s house, sipped my iced mocha, held my camcorder, and waited for my subject to do something.

I was a private investigator specializing in workers compensation. Long hours, including weekends and holidays, lots of waiting, in extreme heat and cold. Most of the time boring. Until, everything happens in a blink of an eye.

I’ve worked in several states, got to see the beautiful sights and sounds. More importantly, it taught me many things about human behavior, specifically how people behave when they thought no one was looking. Those two lessons always stuck with me whenever I wrote fiction.

Now, I’m a stay-at-home dad of two boys. The stakeouts replaced by school pickups, cooking, cleaning, changing diapers, and emotional negotiations. But I never stopped writing. The jobs change, but the struggle to write always stays.

The story I’ve been working on

Since late 2018 I’ve been building a sci-fi trilogy called The Package. Most of it in my head before putting it down on paper a year later. Created multiple drafts with dozens of revisions. Even hired someone on Fiverr to create two ebook covers for the first two novelettes, until I got tired of the project and put them on the backburner.

It wasn’t until I created my blog ErnestOrtizWritesNow.com last December that gave me the drive to finish The Package. The first two novelettes are out now on Gumroad. The third and final one drops in August.

Here’s the setup:

Malcolm Diego is a cyberjacker. Think hacker, but wired directly into computer and comm systems via an implant at the back of his neck. He lives on Unity Station orbiting Earth. Work is scarce and money is tight. His ex-girlfriend shows up and asks him to deliver a package to her mother on a colony in the Asteroid Belt.

He says yes. He shouldn’t have.

What follows takes Malcolm from Earth orbit to the Asteroid Belt to Jupiter, through smuggling runs, corrupt officials, pirates, and a conspiracy that turns out to be much bigger than one package.

I wrote the kind of sci-fi I wanted to read: fast-paced, character-driven, no technobabble, no fifty-page prologue explaining the political history of the solar system, not even a timeline. Just a guy trying to make it through the next problem without getting killed.

Originally, it was supposed to be one short story. But it turned out bigger than I expected. Sometimes, ideas can expand more than you can handle and the best you can do is to contain as much as possible.

Why short fiction instead of a novel

Each installment is a novelette, around 5,000 to 20,000 words. The third story, Sovereign, is almost 20,000. You can read one in a couple of hours.

I’m a stay-at-home dad. I don’t have time to read novels or nonfiction books anymore. My readers are probably busy people too. Short fiction that respects your time feels right to me.

There’s also something I love about novelettes and novellas as a form. It’s long enough to build real characters and real stakes, yet short enough to stay tight. No filler. Every character, every scene, every sentence earns its place.

Where to get it

Both novelettes are available on Gumroad, both PDF and EPUB included in a ZIP file, no subscription required, just a one-time purchase.

The Package (Novelette 1 – 10 chapters, 10,800 words) > ernestortizwritesnow.gumroad.com/l/thepackageone

The Package: Foul Run (Novelette 2 – 13 chapters, 12,600 words) >

ernestortizwritesnow.gumroad.com/l/thepackagefoulrun

The first book is $1 while the second is $3. Both ebooks are less than a premium coffee, as I keep saying, because it’s true and I’m not above using it.

The third installment, The Package: Sovereign, lands in August or sooner. Subscribe here and I’ll let you know the moment it’s live.

What to expect

I’ll be posting here about writing, the craft, the process, what it’s actually like to write fiction and nonfiction as a stay-at-home dad, and former private investigator, with limited hours and no quiet. I’ll share behind the scenes on the trilogy and whatever comes next.

Until I say otherwise, I will post two articles on Substack every month, one free and the EOWN Letter for paid subscribers. It’s $5/month and $45/year.

If you read The Package and want to tell me what you thought, reply back. I read everything.

Thanks for being here. Until next month.

• Ernest L. Ortiz, ErnestOrtizWritesNow.com

Thanks for reading. This first issue is free for everyone. If you’re interested in more of The Ernest Ortiz Writes Now Letter, it’s $5/month or $45/year.

As I reach my mid 30s, it keeps getting clear to me that I cannot train as I used to earlier in my life.

During college and later when I joined the workforce, I could workout for 2 hours everyday and still could function well throughout the day. The recovery was never an issue. I would still be able to active throughout the day. Never had I felt the need to stretch, although I always did because I liked doing so. This is what has made me hyper flexible.

Now it appears I cannot do the same. Lately It is becoming clearer to me that I should change my plan.

This knowledge has not been made available to me without charges. For past few years I have been struggling with being active at the gym. I would go for a few days, workout and then something would happen. I would pull my shoulder, or sprain it or my back would give out.

Thus I would again have to take a break and rest till it heals.

For past few months I have been reading more about training and nutrition. A very important part of that is recovery. A part that earlier I would never think and would train 7 days if had time.

Now I only workout 3 days a week and rest of the days I only walk or do light cardio. This helps me keep my heart rate up and keeps the blood flowing. More blood flow helps in recovery much more. Even with all this, I can’t simply come out of bed and start moving. The way my son does. :D

I have to do small movements before I do the big ones. Ones like moving my toes, then ankle, pelvis, shoulders. If I get out of bed, without doing these, the body does not feel the same. It moves hard, with minor pains here and there.

A big weapon I am finding is taking warm shower after getting out of bed. You have heard of cold shower. Two times I took those and it froze my shoulder. I was walking like Robot for 3 days. Warm shower all the way.

Never had I thought the mid 30s would be like this but I have had years of bad posture, over training. The bill is coming now.

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