Photo Credit: Audoo
Ever heard your music playing over a retail speaker only to find you weren’t paid for it? That’s exactly what happened to Ryan Edwards and why he founded Audoo. So what is Audoo and how is it helping shore up performance royalties for artists?
The following was created in collaboration with Audoo, a company DMN is proud to be partnered with.
Audoo uses real-time data to help performing rights organizations (PROs) and collective management organizations (CMOs) to accurately pay royalties for streams. The company was founded in 2018 by Ryan Edwards. Edwards was shopping in a retail space when he heard his own top 10 hit over the loudspeaker. After checking his royalty statement and realizing he wasn’t paid for music he definitely heard–Edwards wondered why.
The short answer is that PROs and CMOs pay performance royalties to artists based on estimates of radio play and manual data-entry. Artists and composers can miss out here because estimations are a much less accurate representation of what’s being played in a given space.
While Top 40 music may dominate a trendy coffee shop–a local book store may feature more niche artists. Edwards created Audoo to address this inaccuracy by providing a technical solution that tracks what music is played across public spaces.
How the Audoo Audio Meter Works
Audoo has created a low-cost audio meter that resembles a small black box. The audio meter plugs into an outlet at coffee shops, restaurants, gyms, bars, and any other public space to take a GDPR-complaint digital imprint of the music played. It uses a circular microphone array to accurately identify music tracks against a database of over 120 million tracks.
The data collected is relayed in real-time to Audoo’s cloud-based platform. From there, the data is shared with partnered royalty societies so that the blanket music license fee paid by the retailer is given to the correct artists and songwriters.
The Audoo audio meter makes it easier for music license holders since it eliminates manual reporting & admin requirements. It also provides concrete data that artists & songwriters are receiving public play–and therefore should be receiving performance royalties. The audio meter can track music from any source and is dead simple to install.
Artists & songwriters benefit by seeing accurate performance royalties for their works, but it also gives them a better understanding of how these royalties are generated.
Because the audio meter is collecting actual data about the music played, artists can better understand their fanbase around the world. Artists of all sizes are supported, since the meter accurately reflects data of the music being played at the location. Whether that’s Alanis Morrisette or The Midnight–Audoo provides real-world accurate data so artists are paid based on actual plays rather than estimations.
No sensitive personal data is collected by the audio meter. It only monitors the audio playing in the background at set, short time intervals. The meter strips out all foreground noise before collecting a digital fingerprint to send to the Audoo cloud database. The result is that PROs and CMOs are given an accurate data reflection of public performances where Audoo meters are installed.