Today musictech company Audoo secured a $5 million investment in its latest funding round, with investors including global music and business icons Sir Elton John and David Furnish, taking its total raised to $22 million.
Artists lose out on up to $3 billion globally in unaccounted royalties from public performance royalties for music played in locations like cafes, bars, hair salons, restaurants, gyms, and retail stores. In response, Audoo has developed the Audio Metre, a device that tracks and reports music played in public spaces with never-seen-before accuracy.
The hardware is embedded with a circular microphone array and signal processing techniques to cut through the noise of busy environments to recognise the music being played accurately — detecting songs from a database of over 120 million tracks globally.
The data is captured in an encrypted digital fingerprint, securely transmitted to Audoo's cloud-based platform, and distributed directly to partnered collection societies. This leads to more accurate payments.
John is following in the footsteps of other music industry titans who have invested in Audoo, including Edinv, Sir Paul McCartney's investment company MPL Ventures, Tileyard London, and Abba's Bjorn Ulvaeus in their support to improve the challenge of accurate royalty payments for musicians worldwide.
John commented:
"Working as a musician can be seen as all glitz and glamour, but for the vast majority of artists, especially new and emerging acts, this isn't the case. It's often brutally unfair, and this sadly extends into being paid correctly.
Right now, artists are not being paid accurately for their plays because the data simply doesn't exist.
People have given up on their dreams and we've lost talent and future stars because of this disparity. That's why we've invested in Audoo and their world-class technology and data, to help create a more transparent system for everyone, and ultimately to keep the music alive."
Ryan Edwards, Audoo founder and CEO, shared:
"Being able to draw on the support of artists in our mission to revolutionise the royalty space has been key to Audoo's success, and we are incredibly proud to welcome even more icons to aid in the next stage of our journey.
With Elton and David's strategic investment, we will be able to continue to champion and deliver a fairer, and more transparent music industry for creatives to benefit for generations to come.
We look forward to welcoming more international partners, licensees and creators to join us on this industry-changing journey."
Lead image: Elton John via Rocket Entertainment. Photo: Ben Gibson.
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