The MLC Partners With Beatdapp to Fight Streaming Fraud

The Mechanical Licensing Collective (The MLC) has partnered with Beatdapp, an independent fraud detection company, to prevent streaming fraud. While the MLC already has internal measures in place to fight against this, their collaboration with Beatdapp will provide additional and complementary protections to their database.

Beatdapp has quickly become the music industry’s go-to for independent fraud analysis in the last few years. The company has worked for a number of record labels, collection societies, distributors and streaming services to help them sift through trillions of lines of data and identify and investigate suspicious patterns. At the beginning of this year, Beatdapp announced a strategic partnership with Universal Music Group and a fundraise of $17 million in its latest funding round. Other clients include SoundCloud, Beatport, 7digital and more.

According to a report from Centre National de la Musique (CNM), a government-backed organization that supports France’s music industry, in 2021, over 1 billion music streams — between 1% and 3% of all streams generated in the country that year — were fraudulent. Streaming fraud can take on a number of forms. This can include falsely claiming royalties and ownership of songs made by other artists, or uploading songs and juicing their stream count using various means, like bot farms or account hacking.

Billboard has investigated the rise and persistence of royalties fraud, including one story detailing an outfit out of Arizona, called Mediamuv, which stole $23 million in YouTube royalties over the course of 5 years. “The methods used by fraudsters are constantly evolving and improving,” as the CNM report states.

“The MLC is uniquely positioned within the music industry to contribute significantly to addressing streaming fraud,” says Andrew Mitchell, chief analytics and automation officer at The MLC. “Building on our ongoing efforts, we are proud to be working with Beatdapp to further amplify the many ways The MLC serves its 43,000+ Members.”

“The MLC plays a vital role in the music industry and we’re proud to collaborate with them and enhance their continuous efforts to combat streaming fraud,” says Morgan Hayduk and Andrew Batey, co-CEOs at Beatdapp. “Beatdapp has built its technology by learning from the best trust and safety solutions serving other online verticals and tailoring our technology to the unique attributes of music, to provide an unbiased, independent fraud detection solution capable of grappling with the persistent and ever-changing nature of fraud.”