Audoo was founded in 2018 with a vision to create a more accurate system for compensating artists and composers in the music industry for the public performance of their work.
The idea was conceived when CEO & Founder Ryan Edwards was shopping in a retail store and heard his own top 10 hit being played. Shortly afterwards, when checking his royalty statement, he was surprised to see that he hadn’t been paid for the broadcast and started to wonder why.
Ryan found that historically, Performing Rights Organisations (PROs) & Collective Management Organisations (CMOs) have paid public performance royalties from estimations based on popular radio play and manual data-entry. As a result, many artists and composers often miss out.
Since conception, we’ve created a technical solution which tracks music played across public performance locations. Our low-cost highly effective Audio Meter simply plugs in to premises such as shops, restaurants, gyms and bars, and takes a GDPR compliant digital imprint of the music playing. From there the information is relayed in real time to PROs & CMOs, ensuring rights holders are compensated fairly and accurately every time their music is played.
Our Audio Meter is unique to the market. Using a circular microphone array, we can track vast amounts of music in any given setting. Our cutting-edge signal processing techniques mean that we can make accurate identification of tracks, whilst stripping out the foreground noise.
As the music is broadcast at partnered public performance locations the Audio Meter uses our unique algorithm to match against a vast library of over 70 million tracks to accurately identify the song being played, all whilst being GDPR compliant.
By partnering with us, PROs & CMOs are able to make public performance royalty payments to their members based on real-world, real-time data. Our technology provides PROs & CMOs with a new age of insights into public performance of their members work, giving them accurate data feeds from across the globe. We provide opportunity for unparalleled royalty statements with full transparency, whilst digitising and streamlining manual processes for PROs, CMOs and licence holders alike.
Although the Covid-19 pandemic, and resultant lockdowns, slowed down the rollout of our services, as public performance venues have been closed for much of the last 15 months, it also gave the team a long period of time to focus completely on improving and refining the technology. Because of this, we have been able to make a fast and confident start to 2021, when even the most optimistic of us in the company were expecting a slow few months. Having completed a month-long pilot, we are on the cusp of our first full-scale commercial deal, and have agreed several more pilots in different countries across the world. After being apprehensive at the start of the year, we are now ready to implement our technology and vision across multiple territories.
This intrinsically global nature of our business is another reason we believe we are perfectly placed to be a CreaTech One to Watch in 2021. The major Performing Rights Organisations around the world use the same model for the distribution of performance royalties, and have been using similar techniques up to this point to work out to which artists, musicians and composers to distribute those royalties. In this way, our patented technology is both necessary and implementable across the world.
Right from the start, from early conversations to planning pilots, our business has been world-facing. As we rapidly scale up in 2021, we will be deeply involved in international trade. While our team and our manufacturing is based in the UK, we will be doing business with many of Britain’s key trading partners, both in Europe and in the rest of the world. The Creative Industries Council’s CreaTech Ones to Watch list could provide a perfect launchpad to do this, conferring a level of legitimacy and brand visibility which would allow this UK-based business to revolutionise performance royalty distribution around the world.
