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Fraud on music streaming platforms is a common and serious problem for platforms, labels, and artists alike. And AI is only making it harder to deal with.

Today’s startup has a plan to clean things up with machine learning and ‘evidence packs’. Read on to find out more.

But first:

• Versori, which we profiled back in 2022, has been acquired by US tax software company Avalara for an undisclosed sum.

• PXN Ventures’ Praeseed ‘cohort investment programme’ for pre-revenue (or less than £250,000) companies in the North of England is back for its next run. Founders can apply here.

• What makes female founders tick in 2026? Female Founders Rise has published The Rise Report to help you find out.

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XYNQ wants to clean up fraud in music streaming

Streaming platforms might not be the greatest source of revenue for artists, but the modern music industry relies on them as a key channel for marketing and building data about fanbases.

But streaming platforms are also great platforms for fraud. With an average of 106,000 uploads every day, it’s easy for nefarious people to upload music in the guise of famous artists to attract streams they shouldn’t get.

I remember Spotify playing me a bunch of Latin American hip-hop at one point because the artists had the same names as 90s indie bands I had listened to. And electronic music is rife with bland tracks masquerading as being produced by big names, often a bunch of them on the same track.

With AI music generators now making soundalike content easy to produce, the problems are only getting worse. French streaming platform Deezer says it has detected that around 39% of its daily uploads, that’s 60,000 per day, are AI generated.

XYNQ wants to bring trust back to streaming platforms by making sure artists and fans alike are protected.

The startup’s first product is called Origin and it’s targeted at the distributor companies that artists use to add music to streaming platforms.

Origin acts as a kind of gatekeeper, giving scores to uploaded music that can help distributors make sure they’re only putting out music that should be published. It also creates an ‘evidence pack’ for each decision in case of any disputes that might arise.

“We're looking at anomaly detection as well as past behaviour to be able to decide for whether or not this song, and the content within it, is fraudulent,” says XYNQ founder and CEO Leo Fakhrul.

“We're looking at things such as metadata, and we're looking at common patterns in AI-generated music. And all of this is powered by automated decision making, so that we can help the moderators who are having to ingest this content in this process.”

“If a song were to ever get taken down from Spotify because they believed it was fraudulent when it in fact was not, then we could dispute that correctly and efficiently with an evidence pack to tell them this is the score and the readings that came back, the biometric pass, if you will… Spotify takes down songs without any anyone's authority… And when it's taken down, it's taken down.”

XYNQ’s Origin product is set to gain policy and regulatory compliance features in the future, with more features to follow.

“We'll be able to provide one evidence pack that shows you where a song has come from, who made it, the people who have the rights to it. A distributor will be able to use that as a JSON or PDF,” Fakhrul says.

The story so far

Edinburgh-based Fakhrul has an academic background in economics and is currently in the final year of a law degree.

He discovered the pain point underpinning XYNQ when he set up an Afrobeat-focused music platform called Mamba Sounds, which found itself a victim of impersonation fraud.

“It was such a painful moment for us. Financially, operationally and also reputationally, it hurt us massively. And so we came up with this idea of Origin to solve the problem.” Fakhrul says.

“In the music industry, you need to have connections as music people. And the reason that we will find success within this market is because originally we are music people. We are music people first before anything else. And if you come into music industry as a tech person, people look at you a bit funny, because you need to build trust. And unless you're a music person, you don't know what that trust is.”

Fakhrul is building XYNQ with Ziyad Alrasbi, with whom he also co-founded Mamba Sounds.

In January, they won the Build Like A Pro event in Manchester that we covered recently. As for next steps, Fakhrul says they’ve just brought on a design partner in the music distribution world to help further develop the product further.

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