Why music distributors still fight fraud alone
The high street already shares the warning
Shop owners on a high street figured this out years ago. If someone steals from one store, the rest of the street hears about it by lunch. They swap descriptions. They warn each other. No platform. No formal system. Just people who realised that protecting themselves meant protecting each other.
Music never built that.
The same names keep showing up
A while back we were talking to another distributor owner, doing what people in this corner of the industry always end up doing when they get honest: venting about fraud. The same names. The same patterns. Catch someone, ban them, watch them show up somewhere else within a week.
He was the one who brought up the high street. I haven’t been able to drop it.
Labels, distributors, and platforms all deal with the same bad actors, the same fake streams, the same fraudulent accounts, the same royalty games. They deal with them alone. Every company rebuilding the same detection. Every team burning hours on someone three other companies already banned last month.
One flag is noise. Across the network it’s a ring
One red flag at one distributor is noise. That same flag across three distributors, two DSPs, and a payment provider is a ring. Nobody connects those dots because nobody shares the signal.
What we built
I’ve been working on this quietly for a long time. Building it. Testing it against real data. Not talking about it in public. That changes now.
Together with Christopher Edmonds, we’ve built Groovian: a fraud signal network for labels, distributors, and platforms. You pool what you know about bad actors without exposing sensitive data. When one company flags something, detection gets sharper for everyone else. Fraud isn’t one red flag. It’s a pattern across timing, geography, devices, and catalogues. No single company sees enough of that picture. Groovian joins the dots.
Putting a name on it in public feels different from knowing the work matters. The problem is too big to keep it quiet, and we are ready to start onboarding companies.
The team
The team around this is small and it’s the right one.
Christopher Edmonds
Christopher Edmonds is my co-founder and the technical architect. He founded Remetrik and was CTO at Music Tech Works, both Techstars companies. He sits on the board of JAMMS, a neighbouring rights CMO. Distribution, royalties, DDEX, catalogue intelligence: that’s his world. The privacy-preserving architecture underneath Groovian is his.
Amanda Schupf
Amanda Schupf advises on partnerships, fundraising, and M&A. Twenty-plus years across music publishing and rights, including Epidemic Sound, Songtradr, INgrooves, and Imagem. She now runs her consulting company, MAX.
Josh Simons
Josh Simons advises on positioning. He introduced me to Amanda. He’s CEO of Vinyl Group and founded Vampr, which Fast Company named one of the most innovative companies in 2022. He saw the problem early and understood why a shared signal network changes the math.
A few shop owners decided sharing what they knew beat suffering alone. Music is late to the same realisation.
If you’ve watched the same bad actors cycle through your systems, if you’ve ever thought “someone else must have already caught this person,” I want to hear from you. Get in touch.