But not long after “The Jukebox of Regret” was finished in July and posted on SoundCloud, nearly every song on it somehow turned up on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube and at least a dozen other streaming platforms.

Disc Makers, the CD production company hired by the band, was about to start pressing copies of the album and, as part of its routine due diligence, ran the metadata of the songs — their digital fingerprints, essentially — through a program designed to determine if they were originals.

Despite their backgrounds, both men were stymied by the vast and arcane world of music streaming fraud, a realm where anonymous pirates are constantly devising new ways to steal from the $17 billion a year pool of royalty money intended for artists.

In the late 1990s and early aughts, millions of fans routinely downloaded songs from online peer-to-peer file services without paying a penny, a fiasco that cost the industry a fortune.

In the streaming world, 40 seconds of noise is as much a song as “Hey Jude.” To garner listens for these tracks, fraudsters buy log-ins to legitimate accounts on Spotify and other services cheaply and in bulk on the dark web.

Mr. Post stuck with this philosophy for decades, but it was tested after the theft of “The Jukebox of Regret.” The galling part was that Bad Dog’s connection to the songs had been completely erased.

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