Andrew Batey and the audience that wasn’t there

For a while, Andrew Batey’s job was to help people get noticed. He worked the early social platforms, helped promote artists, and learned the mechanics of attention while much of the entertainment business was still deciding whether Facebook mattered. Today, a large part of his work involves looking at attention and asking whether anybody actually paid it.

Batey is the co-founder and co-CEO of Beatdapp, a company that detects music streaming fraud. A play count can look wonderfully reassuring until some of the listeners turn out to be software. Then the number becomes a claim on money that could otherwise have gone to somebody who made music for people.

There is a neat career reversal here: a promoter becoming an examiner of promotion. But Batey’s working life resists a tidy conversion story. He also invests in startups, makes music, and owns a Florida brewery with his wife. The common interest seems to be what happens after the impressive number arrives.

Before the play button became a pay cheque

His route into music technology began with stories of another kind. Batey has described starting as a literary agent in film and television, including work involving family animation. Around 2007, he became involved in Facebook games, at a time when the platform’s campus origins still shaped how people understood it.

He remembers trying to persuade businesses to participate and encountering people who regarded Facebook as something for students. Games offered a way to reach across those small social worlds. The work grew into an agency, which he later sold. Before Beatdapp, his roles included managing partner at Cross Coast Group and chief marketing officer at Spinlister, the peer-to-peer bicycle marketplace.

These were useful places to learn that a platform’s rules and its users’ habits do not always develop at the same speed. Promotion meant understanding how a system distributed attention, then finding a way through it. A record could be good and remain unheard. A clever campaign could travel further than anyone expected. Neither outcome came with an explanation attached.

The friendship came before the company

Batey studied marketing at Trinity Western University, then returned for an MBA in management of a growing enterprise. The undergraduate dates are 2002 to 2006; the MBA followed in 2012 and 2013. It was during graduate school that he became friends with Morgan Hayduk.

The two were on a travelling case competition team. They spent time working through business problems together, the sort of exercise that makes another person’s thinking difficult to conceal. They wanted to build something together, although they had not yet settled on what.

Hayduk brought experience in music policy and industry relations. Batey brought experience in promotion and building businesses. Pouria Assadipour, Beatdapp’s third co-founder and chief technology officer, supplied the technical leadership. Their eventual company put those different backgrounds around the same question: could music’s digital accounting be made more dependable?

By June 2021, their attempt was being discussed in an INSEAD case webinar about technology, entrenched power, and the difficulty of changing an industry from inside it. The problem required software and a reason for established businesses to trust the people selling it.

A very good number can still be wrong

The initial request sounds modest. In late 2017, a label wanted a way to verify how many times a song had played on a streaming service. Counting was supposed to make the accounting clearer. But an accurate count of manufactured listening would leave the larger problem untouched. Beatdapp’s work moved toward identifying fraud.

The stakes are easier to understand with a deliberately small example. Imagine a fixed royalty pool shared according to each track’s portion of eligible listening. Your song has ten plays out of a hundred. Add a hundred fake plays elsewhere, and your share falls from ten percent to five percent. Your audience did nothing differently. The denominator did.

Actual streaming agreements are more complicated, but this simplified arithmetic explains why manufactured listening can reach into another artist’s pocket. The fraud does not need to impersonate that artist or steal that recording. It can compete for a share of the same money.

Batey describes detection as a problem of context. An account repeating one song around the clock is comparatively easy to spot. A script that mixes its target among ordinary listening is more troublesome. Beatdapp examines streaming records, anonymized behaviour, and suspicious activity histories, with outside context such as touring and holidays. A strange pattern on one service may become clearer across several.

Getting invited inside

In January 2024, Beatdapp announced a US$17 million funding round alongside a partnership with Universal Music Group and collaborations with SoundExchange and Napster. The money was intended to support hiring, technical development, and expansion into additional markets.

The company said it had analysed more than two trillion streams and twenty trillion data points during 2023. Those are company activity figures, rather than a tally of money returned to artists. Their significance is the amount of listening that the team was being asked to examine.

The relationships also matter. A business trying to check streaming data needs access to it, and access depends on institutions agreeing to participate. Beatdapp’s advisory circle has included Priority Records founder Bryan Turner and former Spotify publishing executive Adam Parness. Batey’s work sits between those music relationships and the engineering required to make scrutiny useful.

He joined Leadership Music’s class of 2024, a programme bringing people from different parts of the business together. For someone working on a problem that crosses labels, platforms, distributors, and artists, knowing how those neighbours think is practical preparation.

The song was called “Drinkin’ Drinks”

Batey has also tried being on the other side of the release calendar. Under the name Urban Outlaws, he released “Drinkin’ Drinks.” The 2022 project earned a placement on Spotify’s Wild Country playlist. It is a particularly apt extracurricular activity for somebody whose day job involves questioning what a successful release looks like.

His own account is less polished than the standard founder biography. Talking through the experiment, he acknowledged that an exciting first week left him poorly prepared for the following weeks. There was no developed plan for shows or for maintaining a relationship with the new listeners. Getting noticed had solved only the first part.

That experience gives some weight to his advice to artists: stay after the show, meet people, and give them a reason to stay connected. The work sounds inconvenient because it is. A listener has to become somebody who remembers you, returns, and might buy a ticket. A dashboard offers fewer opportunities to shake hands.

He has taught advertising and marketing at university level, too. Between the classroom and the release experiment, he has had opportunities to explain a strategy and discover where his own needed revision.

“You should at least get paid correctly.”

Andrew Batey, on the basic promise to artists

An investor enters through the side door

Batey’s other substantial enterprise is Side Door Ventures. Its name reflects an approach he described in 2024: meet a founder as a fellow founder, offer help, and sometimes reveal an interest in investing after the relationship has begun. The conversation gets going before the cheque becomes the subject.

The firm invests broadly. Its stated interests run from software and financial services to space, gaming, and frontier technology. Batey’s role as founder and general partner puts him in contact with businesses far beyond music, while his experience as an operator gives him a practical starting point for those conversations.

He has spoken about organising the venture platform around multiple smaller funds, rather than simply progressing toward one ever larger fund. That choice lets different investment efforts have different areas of attention. In September 2026, he was still discussing the approach publicly, alongside Beatdapp’s evolution.

There is ambition here, but also a distinction between enjoying an industry and believing a particular business can deliver the returns venture investing requires. Batey has talked candidly about the difficulty of turning enthusiastic music fans into paying customers. An audience can be devoted and a business can still struggle to find its footing.

The coffee was already part of the routine

One venture began much closer to home. Batey and his family moved from Vancouver to Florida in 2022. Mocama, a brewery and coffee destination in Fernandina Beach, became a place they visited in the mornings and for community events. When the business faced closure, he and his wife, Kim, decided to take it on.

Kim took responsibility for front of house. Andrew took on back of house and distribution. He has described inheriting debt, difficult costs, and a need to rebuild staff morale and community confidence. An ordinary morning habit had become a substantial operating commitment.

By August 2026, a Florida Beer Podcast visit described Mocama as a brewery, full-service kitchen, and coffee shop in a former car dealership and tile showroom. The coffee shop opened at 7:30 in the morning. Somewhere between digital royalty records and early coffee service lies an unusually varied working day.

The brewery also makes Batey’s interest in relationships tangible. A regular customer returns, brings a friend, or stops coming. The feedback is delivered across a counter. Nobody needs a data science team to establish that a person standing there has arrived.

Who gets through the door next?

Beatdapp’s remit has widened. In December 2025, it introduced a Trust & Safety Operating System combining anomaly detection, identity checks, AI music detection, account takeover detection, and recommendations. The proposed customers extended into gaming, streaming, and online marketplaces.

In a January 2026 conversation, Batey and Hayduk discussed that broader system and the details needed to understand how manipulation happens. The company’s original music problem had become an entry point into questions faced by many digital businesses: who is participating, what are they doing, and can the activity be trusted?

Batey is also developing Slow Burn Records, a record label focused on building artists’ careers. Alongside the investment work and the brewery, it suggests he intends to keep a hand in the creation of things people might want to gather around.

His advice about relationships is unusually plain for a career involving so many platforms: “Go deep, not wide.” That is a useful place to leave him. The count still matters. So does the person who comes back tomorrow.