An Audoo Meter has been installed in our shop as part of a partnership launch with PRS for Music and PPL.

The Audoo Audio Meter is a plug mounted device with a small microphone array that captures music being played in businesses and reports the data directly to performing right organisations around the world in near real-time so that the songwriters and musicians can get paid faster and more accurately for their music.

Previously, background music royalties would have to be calculated by performing right organisations (PROs) via complex estimations taking things into account like song market share, because such granular data wasn’t available retrospectively let alone in real-time. Audoo is changing that not only with data about the song and its performers via its Audio Meters, but also at what time it was played and precisely where.

The Audoo Audio Meters have two key technology processes. The first is for the meter to be able to distinguish when a song is being played from background noise. Once that happens it switches its music recognition process on, which matches the track’s audio fingerprint with a database on the device and then reports the play to the PRO partner via cloud API in near real-time.

Audoo’s Audio Meters are GDPR compliant and will respect our shop visitors’ privacy because they don’t retain the recordings. They do all the noise sensing and data matching using their in-built hardware and automatically delete the short recording once the song’s metadata has been matched and reported via the cloud.

Audoo onboarded to our programme in July 2019 and since graduating has raised over £14m, with backers including Björn Ulvæus and Sir Paul McCartney’s MPL Ventures, to develop and roll out its Audio Meters with PROs around the globe, beginning with Australia’s APRA in July 2022.

Founder & CEO Ryan Edwards said:

“There is nothing like being home and Abbey Road Studios & the whole team played a vital part in our early evolution and remain some of our most important industry friends to this very day. With our approach to innovation in the name of adding meaningful value to the industry, this time helping artists and performers get paid faster and more accurately, we like to think we’re playing our small part in continuing the Studio’s homegrown legacy of innovation."