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In the gambling world, the Las Vegas Black Book is one that you don’t want to be in.
Officially known as the Nevada Gaming Control Board Excluded Person List, it is a compendium that dates to the early 1960s.
This is when the NGCB put together a roster of people who casinos should keep out. Those who made the original 53 were considered “known hoodlums” with “notorious or unsavory reputation”.
These days, the Las Vegas Black Book exists more as an online reference and includes all manner of cheaters, from blackjack and roulette to slots and poker cheating scandals.
Roulette Rulebreaker
The latest addition to the book: a Mississippi illusionist by the name of Shaun Joseph Benward. He has a history of gaming violations. But what got him into the Black Book was the allegation of committing a roulette scheme.
Allegedly, the scheme involved Benward somehow convincing casino crews that he placed bets on winning numbers after the numbers had already come in.
One thing that interests me is the borderline between cheaters and advantage players. One breaks the rules, the other looks for any possible edge without going over the line into straight cheating.
Benward was a cheater. He did a verbal equivalent of past posting. But if he had been able to clock the roulette wheel, had knowledge of where the ball would land and bet on that number, he would be an AP.
Billy Walters won millions by doing that. He never got impugned with a place in the Black Book. But the move put on by Walters also required a lot more work than what Benward put in for his.
Spotify’s Black Book
That brings me to a guy named Michael Smith. I’m trying to figure out whether he deserves a place in an off-casino edition of the Las Vegas Black Book.
He got busted and stands accused of stealing royalty payments from digital music platforms through fraud. Which he denies.
- He is a legitimate musician who made little money from placing his own songs on music apps such as Spotify.
- So, he came up with something different.
- Working with an AI company, he allegedly produced thousands of AI-generated songs, which he characterized as “instant songs”.
- He placed them across a bunch of different music platforms and had bots playing the songs billions of times.
Royalties racked up. The songs – attributed to artists with names like Calorie Screams and Calvinistic Dust – might have sucked or they might have been great.
Who knows? As someone who grew up steeped in songs by groups like the Flesheaters, DNA, Dead Boys and the Contortions, I don’t think the band names are even terrible.
Fraudster or Advantage Player?
At any rate, Smith had enough songs spread across enough platforms that they were designed not to draw attention. The gambit clearly worked…for a while.
He is said to have accrued some $10 million all told, with over 600,000 daily streams of ‘his’ music. The New York Times wrote that he did it “penny by penny”. Smith argues his music is not AI-made, but human-authored.
As somebody who’s spent a lot of time writing about advantage players – and has participated in a few advantage plays – I’m trying to figure out if Smith is a fraudster or an AP.
While I do not know about the fine print of Spotify contracts, if he is not explicitly prohibited from doing what he did, I vote that he is an AP and not a criminal.
The site accepted his “instant music” as legit songs, allowed the bots to download them and paid him his money. Once he was caught, he backed off.
It’s not so different from hole carding or edge sorting or the clocking of wheels in roulette strategy. Like every sharp AP, he spread his action so that his ploy would not raise red flags.
And when he was first notified that he had been made – via a letter that warned his songs would be taken down – he pled innocence, just as APs before him have done.
“This is absolutely wrong and crazy,” Smith wrote back. “How can I appeal this?”
Unfortunately, music streaming has no equivalent of the Gaming Control Board, where he could plead innocence.
Smith is crafty for sure, but if he’s not behind bars by next year, he might warrant an invitation to the 2025 Blackjack Ball where the instant hit-maker can rub elbows with fellow APs.
