Fixing the Music Industry’s Payment Problem

After discovering gaps in how royalties are tracked, Ryan Edwards built Audoo to bring accuracy, transparency, and fair pay to artists worldwide. When Edwards realised his own music was being played without payment, it exposed a wider industry issue. Public performance royalties have long relied on estimates rather than real data. Audoo aims to change that – helping ensure artists are paid properly for what’s actually played. Entrepreneur UK finds out more…

What market gap did you spot that led to building Audoo?
In my early 20s, I was in an indie rock band that toured UK venues and festivals and reached the top 10 in the UK’s singles chart. Years later, I heard one of our songs playing in a department store and realised I hadn’t been paid for it. That moment made me see a clear gap in the system – public performance royalties weren’t being properly tracked, leaving artists uncompensated for plays of their music.
Royalties are earned when songs are played in public venues like restaurants, bars, cafes, gyms, nightclubs and festivals, and for the most part, when I started looking into it, they were still tracked through outdated, manual processes. In some instances, a small number of venues are visited and music broadcasts are logged, which is used to estimate payment distributions.  But these sample sizes only scratch the surface of all public performance plays, leaving countless performances unaccounted for and artists unpaid.  Other times, radio play and streaming charts are used as proxy data to distribute public performance royalties, meaning payments end up in the pockets of top-charting artists, rather than the smaller and mid-level artists that are truly being played in public venues. 
The more I researched, the clearer it became that this was a global problem. Drawing on my experience in product and retail and my experience in the music industry, I developed Audoo’s Audio Meter, a device that captures music usage in venues and turns it into real-world data for rights organisations to distribute royalties accurately. Today, our devices operate in 14 countries, including the UK, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa, helping artists around the world get paid fairly for their work.

What’s been the hardest part of getting industry adoption for new royalty tech?
From a venue perspective, the biggest challenge is wide-scale education. It can be easy for venues to not fully understand the mechanics of public performance royalty distributions, and many take it for granted that the system simply ‘works’. But when you consider that a small venue can pay around £400 per year for a PRS licence, and larger organisations’ fees can reach tens of thousands of pounds, it’s fair they want to know where that money is actually going – and often, it’s not reaching the artists.
A Bloomberg investigation last year highlighted this issue – it showed that PRS reported collecting £287m ($387m) in public performance royalties for songwriters, but deducted £49m for “distribution processes.” Songwriters like Sir Elton John and Paul McCartney questioned why more efficient technologies aren’t being used to reduce these costs. It really shows how complicated it is to collect accurate data from hundreds of thousands of businesses and match it to millions of individual workers. From the music side, reactions have been mixed. Some PROs, like APRA & IMRO, understand the value Audoo’s technology can bring for members and licensees alike and share our mission to fix the system. Others, sadly, have chosen to keep their head in the sand. But the more stakeholders we can make aware of these gaps – from music creators through to venue owners – the more allies we gain in ensuring that artists and songwriters are paid fairly for every play of their music.

Who benefits most from your solution – artists, venues, or rights organisations?
In an ideal world, everyone would see the value of more accurate royalties – and with our real-world data, artists, venues, and rights organisations all benefit. The Audio Meter allows artists and songwriters to be paid fairly, whether they are global superstars like Ed Sheeran or Adele, or independent musicians just starting out. Every play counts, giving creators of all levels a real chance to earn from their work. Venues gain insights into the music actually being played in their spaces. Organisations with multiple locations, such as Metropolitan Pub Co., can spot trends across sites, while smaller venues can better understand the vibe they’re creating for customers. At the beginning of this year we launched “Audoo Recap” (think Wrapped by Spotify, but for venues!), which provides an interactive overview of venue data, including favourite genres, most-played artists, and even when they start playing seasonal music. We had such a positive reception from this, with many venues saying how it gave them a better understanding on their unique brand and atmosphere. Rights organisations benefit from accurate, real-time data that makes assigning royalties faster and more precise. Traditional analogue methods are slow and often imprecise, so using Audoo simplifies their work while ensuring artists and songwriters are properly compensated. When the goal is fair pay for musicians, technology that makes the process easier and more accurate is an obvious choice.

What advice would you give founders building in industries being disrupted by AI?
AI is changing industries everywhere and has become part of our daily lives; from asking ChatGPT to proofread an email to AI-generated songs being created and even earning royalties. My main advice for founders navigating AI disruption is to stay flexible and don’t believe those pretending to completely understand it – there truly is no expert in AI right now.
I know that’s easier said than done, but we’ve seen similar shifts before. Take the internet, for example, it completely transformed the music industry, changing the ways people consumed music, from CDs to streaming. The key is to stay adaptable and keep an open mind. New technologies like AI will bring challenges, but they also create opportunities. The founders who succeed will be the ones who embrace change, experiment, and find ways to use AI to their advantage rather than fight it.

How is AI-generated music (e.g. Suno) disrupting the economics of the music industry? 
AI-generated music is forcing the industry to confront a difficult reality because the value of human creativity is at risk of being diluted. When music can be created instantly and at scale, it floods the market, making it harder for real artists to be seen, heard, and fairly compensated. We’re already seeing an explosion of AI-created tracks, many generated at scale. This isn’t just increasing competition; it’s displacing opportunities for genuine artists to earn a living from their work. For many creators, this isn’t just an economic issue; it’s existential. Some of our investors, including Bjorn Ulvaeus and Sir Elton John, have spoken out strongly about AI models being trained on copyrighted music without permission, raising important questions around ownership, consent, and fairness. At the same time, AI highlights an existing structural issue. Even before AI, the industry struggled to accurately track music usage, particularly for public performances. Royalties are often distributed using proxies like radio or streaming data, rather than actual usage. So when you combine an explosion in AI-generated content with a system that already struggles to measure usage accurately, the risk is that value becomes even more diluted and even less fairly distributed.

How does Audoo turn better data into a scalable business model?
At our core, Audoo exists to solve a fundamental data gap in the music industry – understanding what’s actually being played in public spaces. We’ve created a small, easy-to-install device that sits in venues and captures music usage in real time. That data gives Performing Rights Organisations the insight they need to distribute royalties more accurately and fairly. The scalability comes from two main factors. The hardware is low-cost, simple to deploy, and can work anywhere from a single venue to a chain with locations around the world. At the same time, the more venues we onboard, the richer and more actionable the dataset becomes, creating value that grows naturally as we scale. Venues want to know that the money they pay goes to the artists they play.

But beyond PROs, that data has real value for copyright owners themselves – publishers, labels, and song funds, who historically have had very limited visibility into how their music is used in public performance. Through Audoo, they can start to track how their IP is actually being played in the real world, identify trends across venue types or geographies, and better understand the true reach and longevity of their catalogues. That insight not only supports more accurate royalty distribution, but also opens up new ways to value and manage music rights – particularly for catalogue owners looking to optimise and future-proof their assets.

What defensibility does your technology have as AI music tools evolve?
We’ve built systems into our platform that continuously monitor the data for anomalies. For example, if a track is being played on repeat in a way that looks artificial, or if something doesn’t align with expected listening patterns, our backend can flag that behaviour. As AI-generated and even deepfake content becomes more prevalent, having that layer of scrutiny is critical – it creates a safeguard so that royalties aren’t being manipulated or misallocated.

More broadly, we’re deeply integrated into the infrastructure of the music industry. We work directly with performing right organisations, collection management organisations, publishers, record labels and large venue groups, which creates a powerful network effect and embeds our data into how they operate. As AI tools evolve and the volume of music increases, that actually strengthens our position. The more content there is, the more important it becomes to have accurate, trusted, and verifiable measurement of what’s being played.

How do you balance innovation with regulation in such a complex industry?
The music industry is well set up with strong copyright laws that have stood for decades around the world, but innovation can’t happen in isolation – it has to work within existing frameworks while helping evolve them. From day one, we’ve taken a privacy-first approach to how our technology works. Our Audio Meter doesn’t record, transmit or store audio. No raw audio ever leaves the device, and there’s no language processing capability on purpose – so it’s fundamentally incapable of capturing conversations or personal data.

That level of privacy assurance has been critical to adoption. It’s why we’ve been trusted to deploy in highly sensitive environments, including nurseries, where safeguarding standards are understandably high. Beyond privacy, there’s also a broader data integrity challenge in the industry. Linking music usage to the correct rights holders isn’t always straightforward – identifiers like ISRCs and ISWCs are often missing, duplicated, or inconsistent across the supply chain.

We see part of our role as contributing to the ecosystem. We work closely with organisations like CISAC and DDEX to improve data standards, flag gaps in the chain, and create opportunities for that data to be corrected. The goal is simple: if the data is accurate, payments can flow more accurately and faster to the people who created the music. Ultimately, balancing innovation with regulation comes down to trust. If you can build technology that is privacy-safe and improves the integrity of the system, you’re not just operating within regulation; you’re helping move the industry forward.