London, UK (July 27, 2022)—A coalition of music industry and tech organizations has launched a global initiative for fairer, more accurate royalty payments for artists and songwriters from public performance, while removing manual effort for venues and premises, following years of time-consuming manual reporting.
Recognise the Music, which is partnered with the Music Venue Trust (MVT), British tech start-up Audoo, the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), the Association of Independent Music (AIM) and the Music Managers Forum (MMF), is said to be the first step in helping venues and premises across the UK check that their performing rights organization license fees are being distributed to artists and songwriters with accuracy while saving venues time and effort.
Unidentifiable and inaccurate royalty payments are among of the music industry’s biggest challenges, with over £2 billion ($3 billion) in global revenue allocated without the capacity to track where it should go, leading to many songwriters, composers and publishers missing out due to lack of accurate data collection methods and technology, relying instead on estimations and radio plays.
Recognise the Music believes that for all artists and songwriters to get paid with greater accuracy, first it needs to be possible to consistently recognize what music is being played. In the UK alone, there are approximately 400,000 venues already holding a performing rights organization license, indicating the sheer scale of the initiative’s potential impact.
Selected early adopters will be some of the first to receive an Audio Meter, developed by British start-up Audoo, which is fitted with a plug that slots into a standard electrical socket. It recognizes what music is playing and securely fingerprints it, with no audio ever being stored or sent from the device. Providing this new, real-world data means artists and songwriters will receive the correct royalties they are owed for the broadcasting of their work.
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Major industry players are involved in the initiative. The Music Venue Trust (MVT) is a UK registered charity created in 2014 to protect, secure and improve grassroots music venues. To date, MVT has secured the long-term future of iconic grassroots music venues which have played a crucial role in the development of British music over the last 40 years, including Hull Adelphi, Exeter Cavern, Southampton Joiners, The 100 Club, Band on the Wall, and Tunbridge Wells Forum.
Also part of the initiative are the Featured Artists Coalition (FAC), the UK trade body and not-for-profit organization representing the specific rights and interests of music artists, the Association of Independent Music (AIM) which is the not-for-profit trade body exclusively representing the UK’s independent music sector which makes up around a quarter of the recorded music market, and the Music Managers Forum (MMF) which is the world’s largest professional community of music managers.
