My guest this week is Morgan Hayduk, who’s the co-founder and co-CEO of Beatdapp, a company that helps artists, labels, performance rights organizations, and streaming platforms detect fraudulent streams.

Morgan started his career in music as a lobbyist for the Canadian music industry in the area of copyright protection before starting Beatdapp, although the company’s original mission was as a streaming auditing tool for record labels. After many conversations with record execs, it became clear that just about everyone in the industry was having a problem with streaming manipulation, which led to inconsistencies between sales reports and streaming services’ server logs.

As a result, Beatdapp developed a tool to detect fraudulent streams and prevent them from impacting royalty payouts. Industry estimates that anywhere from 10% to 20% of all streams are fraudulent, so Beatdapp’s tool is critical to restoring full payouts to artists everywhere.

During our interview, Morgan spoke about the two goals of streaming fraud, why fraud can’t be detected in a royalty statement, why even AI music companies are worried about streaming fraud, the various different types of streaming fraud, and much more.

I spoke with Morgan via zoom from his office in Los Angeles.

On the intro we look at potential new music delivery format, and some facts about vinyl records.

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