PA MediaA cyberhacker has pleaded guilty to stealing unreleased music from artists including Coldplay, Canadian singer Shawn Mendes and American singer Baby Rexha.
According to the City of London Police, Skylar Dalziel made around £42,000 selling tracks online.
Prosecutor Richard Partridge said he “selfishly used his music to make money for himself by selling it on the dark web”.
The 22-year-old, of Winchester Gardens, Luton, admitted 11 copyright offenses at Luton Crown Court and was sentenced to 21 months in prison, suspended for 24 months.
Det Con Daryl Frat, from the force’s police intellectual property crime unit, said: “It is illegal to steal copyrighted material for your own financial gain.
“It threatens the work of artists and the livelihoods of those who work with them and release their music.”
PA MediaDalzell obtained the music by illegally accessing cloud storage accounts linked to the artists.
The theft came to light after Sony Music Entertainment discovered that a cloud account owned by Upsahl had been compromised and reported it to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) in June 2021.
Forty unreleased tracks had been extracted and were being sold online, police said.
The IFPI and the Recording Industry Association of America identified an account on an online forum that sells unreleased music by various artists and that the account was linked to Dalziel.
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Getty ImagesOfficers said they arrested Dalzell on January 9, 2023 and seized three drives containing 291,941 music tracks.
They also found a spreadsheet showing he had sold tracks to customers and his PayPal and bank accounts showed he received £42,049 from April 2021 to January 2023.
Some of the money was transferred to US bank accounts and the City of London Police said it was working with Homeland Security Investigations to identify those linked to the accounts.
Getty ImagesDalziel pleaded guilty to 11 counts of making an article for sale without a license from the copyright owner, one count of transferring criminal property and three counts of acquiring/using/acquiring criminal property.
He was also sentenced to 180 hours of unpaid work.
Det Con Fryatt said the sentence “sends a clear message that we have the ability and tools to find cyber criminals and hold them to account for their actions”.