Audoo

Music Everywhere: A Data-Led Review of 2025 Public Plays

Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:02:00 +0000

Launched in January, Audoo Recap brought together a full year of music played across public premises – automatically captured via our Audio Meter™ – and turned it into a personalised snapshot of how music lived in our shared spaces.

From standout tracks to unexpected patterns, it reflected the sound of public premises in a way that’s never previously been possible. Public performance tells a very different story to radio, streaming, background music suppliers and physical sales - it’s more varied, more contextual, and often more surprising.

This blog post will delve into our play data for 2025, highlighting the huge difference between public performance data and streaming charts; the difference between venue types and even the differences within multi-site organisations, where you may have expected very similar music across the group.

Comparing UK Public Performance to the UK Official Charts Company streaming / download chart

In summer last year, I compared the UK Official Charts Company half-year chart to the songs we’d seen in Public Performance, which brought to light the huge disparity between the charts and public performance plays. I thought it was worth starting this blog by sharing how 2025 ended up compared to the UK Official Chart 2025.

Following on from the half-year charts, the overlap between Public Performance and the streaming chart remains small - in fact it has decreased from 22 out of 40 in the half-year chart to only 17 songs in common.

The release decade of songs again differs hugely between Audoo’s Public Performance Chart and the Official Chart – the end of year Official Chart only has 3 non-2020’s songs in it, favouring recently releases tracks. Whereas the Public Performance chart remains diverse to the half-year point with 17 non-2020’s songs, demonstrating public performance venues prefer an eclectic mix of songs across multiple decades.

The following table shows the songs that make up 2025 across the UK Official Charts and Public Performance plays. You can click the column headers to sort by the chart positions and explore the relative positions between the charts. You’ll see some huge differences with the song positions – the starkest example is the K-Pop Demon Hunters song Soda Pop that came in at number 36 on the UK Official Chart, but is way down at 8,682 in the public performance chart with just over a hundred plays in the year.

Comparing How Different Industries Play Music

We have Audio Meters installed in all sorts of venues, even less common places such as climbing gyms, car garages, spas or launderettes. In this section we’ll let you explore how music was played in our top five industries: Pubs, Clubs and Bars; Retail, Food and Drink; Fitness and Personal Care.

We’ve done the work to get the top ten songs played in 2025 across these industry types, going down to position 5000, so if the song was not in the top 5000 songs, you’ll see > 5000 in the cell. By clicking the headers, you can sort by the chart position for the industry to compare between them.

You’ll see, for example, that songs that are popular in pubs are never used in fitness or personal care and that retail has some big differences to restaurants.

This chart shows the how small the overlap between the industry types is:

Comparing plays within a specific chain

So, we’ve seen that different types of venues play very diverse music – which might seem obvious, but the extent of the differences is eye-opening. How about looking at diversity within a single chain of venues? Are they all playing the same music or are there different vibes more under the control of the local team?

One of our partners, True Pub Co, have kindly let us share some of their data. We’ve taken their top five pubs that played the most music last year and compare what they played. Each True Pub Co venue had its own musical identity, shaped by neighbourhoods, staff, and customers. From indie and post-punk to Americana rock, soul classics and 2000s dance-pop. No two venues sounded the same - you’ll see 44 songs below, meaning out of the top ten charts songs for each pub that only 6 songs overlapped!

As before, feel free to sort the table to compare between the pubs.

Wrapping Up

We hope you’ve enjoyed looking through the songs we’ve heard during 2025, investigating the differences between streaming and Public Performance charts; differences between how industries use music and uniqueness within a chain of pubs.

Finally, we’ve made Spotify Playlists for each of the 2025 charts for you to take a listen to…

Audoo Top Songs 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Pubs, Clubs, and Bars 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Retail 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Food and Drink 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Fitness 2025

Audoo Top Songs for Personal Care 2025

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Audoo is a mission-led business – we’re not focused on exit

Tue, 10 Feb 2026 15:19:00 +0000

Audoo is changing how the music industry approaches royalty payments – and founder Ryan Edwards says this mission remains his core focus.

Edwards founded the business in 2018 to provide a solution to the challenges faced in public performance royalty data collection and payment distribution via its Audoo Audio Meter device and insights platform.

So impressive is the growth of the London firm – which counts legends including Sir Elton John, Sir Paul McCartney and ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus among its investors – that it has topped our last two MediaTech 50 rankings.

However, despite substantial interest, he says they “do not have an exit strategy for the time being”. “And that’s quite intentional,” he adds. “Audoo is a mission-led business and we’re focused on long-term impact rather than a quick exit. “Of course, we’re consistently approached, and we explore every conversation, just as we do with funding. But the reality is we love working on this company. “We get to spend time with our heroes, solve a problem that’s affected creators for generations, and genuinely change how the industry works. That’s what motivates us, not an exit timeline.”

As a child the entrepreneur would practise drumming along to songs from famous bands in his bedroom. Later, as part of The Lines, he would find himself opening for these heroes – including The Killers, The Charlatans, Jack Peñate and Supergrass.

After The Lines, Edwards focused his career on technology and data, leading teams in creating mobile apps for world football governing body FIFA, B&Q and Barclays; rolling out complex retail data solutions at Visa; and bringing Best Buy to the UK.

In 2018 he was shopping in a department store when he heard his former band’s song Domino Effect playing over the speakers – and wondered whether they were being paid royalties they were due. The idea for Audoo was born. Its Audio Meter – which Edwards says remains true to the original vision sketched out sitting at his kitchen table – has been specifically designed to cut through environmental noise and recognise the music played within commercial premises.

It has now been rolled out around the world. “Commercially, we’ve expanded major partnerships with APRA in Australia and New Zealand, IMRO in Ireland, and BUMA in the Netherlands [in the last 12 months],” Edwards says. “All of those organisations are seeing the positive impact of real-world monitoring and are increasing their deployment of Audio Meters. We’ve also entered the US market, which is a huge step for us. “My own role has become incredibly global. I’m rarely in the UK now because there are so many PROs (performing rights organisations) and industry bodies around the world that want to meet and understand how this technology can finally bring accuracy to royalty distributions.”

However, the UK has been slower on the uptake than other countries.“What we’ve learned is that some markets are true trailblazers. Organisations like APRA and IMRO are deeply committed to accuracy and doing the best for their members, and they’ve embraced technology as the way to achieve that,” says Edwards. “Unfortunately, in our home market we haven’t seen the same level of commitment.

That led us to launch Every Play Counts, our direct-to-venue strategy where we provide Audio Meters at no cost to venues. “Rather than waiting for change, we decided to empower businesses to be part of the solution themselves – and we’ve seen a hugely positive response from venue owners and managers.

“What’s been fascinating is how that has opened up a completely new customer base. Labels, publishers and managers now want access to this data to understand where their music is actually being played in the real world. “That insight simply hasn’t existed before, so Audoo is creating a new layer of intelligence for the entire ecosystem.” Edwards says the huge and fragmented US market is a “very different landscape to anywhere else”. “There are multiple rights organisations, artists move between them, and the market has gone through significant structural change – including one organisation moving from a not-for-profit model to a private-equity-backed business,” he explains. “That creates new behaviours and new incentives, but what we’re already seeing from the first cities we’ve launched in is incredibly clear: real-world public performance data looks nothing like streaming, radio or playlist proxies. “That reinforces why Audoo exists. The industry has been relying on approximations for decades, and the US is proving just as strongly as Europe and Australia that those approximations don’t reflect reality.”

Over the last couple of years, Audoo has moved from being a promising technology into something genuinely transformational for the music industry, Edwards says. “We delivered the world’s first live music monitoring at festivals, which was a huge technical milestone and proved that our Audio Meter can work in even the most complex, high-volume environments. “We also launched Audoo Recap, which for the first time gives venues meaningful data back about the music they play.

That has completely changed the dynamic between venues and PROs – it turns licensing from a cost into a relationship built on transparency and value.”

As for what’s coming next, he says Audoo is in advanced conversations with several new markets that weren’t even on its original roadmap. “The wider ambition hasn’t changed: we want Audoo to become the global standard for how public performance music is measured and how royalties are distributed. “Every additional meter, venue and territory takes us closer to a world where creators are paid based on real data rather than estimates.” Edwards says there hasn’t been a week in the last five years where he hasn’t met someone to discuss ideas, partnerships or the future of the business. “We’re a technology company with big global ambitions, so we’re always exploring options around funding,” he continues. “That said, we don’t currently have an official round open. We’re focused on execution and growth, and we’ll look at the right partners at the right time rather than raising capital for the sake of it.”

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IMRO Partners with Audoo to Modernize and Elevate Music Monitoring in Ireland

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 14:35:15 +0000

The Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) is modernizing how music played in public is tracked, reported and used for royalty distributions through its expanded partnership with technology provider Audoo.

Following the successful launch of the collaboration in May 2024, IMRO and Audoo have strengthened their work together to bring greater transparency, accuracy and ease to how background music usage is reported across Ireland. Live music reporting was also deployed across a number of music festivals in Ireland throughout 2025. IMRO is an early adopter of music recognition technology, integrating anonymised data collected through Audoo’s systems directly into its royalty processing operations.

At the centre of this innovation is the Audoo Audio Meter™, a discreet, plug-in device that automatically identifies and securely reports music played in public environments. This real-world data helps ensure that royalties are distributed accurately and fairly to rightsholders.

Expansion across Ireland

Since the partnership launched in 2024, an increasing number of Irish businesses have installed Audoo Audio Meters™, supporting IMRO’s commitment to transparency and stronger engagement with its licence holders. Recently, Starbucks, Hard Rock Cafe and Leisureplex became the latest major businesses to install the devices across their premises in Ireland.

Ryan Edwards, Founder and CEO of Audoo, said:
“Real-world music data is transforming the way royalties are understood and distributed. IMRO’s continued leadership in this space, including wide-scale venue engagement, demonstrates what’s possible when technology and transparency come together. Our goal is simple: ensure creators are paid fairly, businesses feel supported and the industry benefits from accurate data. We’re delighted to deepen our work with IMRO as they drive the next chapter of digital transformation in Ireland.”

Supporting IMRO’s digital transformation

Eamonn Murray, Chief Technology Officer at IMRO, said:
“The rollout of Audoo devices forms part of IMRO’s wider digital transformation strategy, which also includes the recent launch of its online self-licensing platform, making it easier than ever for businesses to obtain a music licence. Together, these innovations are improving how royalties are licensed and distributed, setting a new standard for transparency, accuracy and fairness across the industry while adding value to music licensing for business owners.”

Strengthening IMRO’s relationship with Irish businesses
The partnership is enhancing IMRO’s engagement with licence holders by providing clearer insights, reduced administrative burden and greater confidence that licence fees are distributed accurately. For venues across hospitality, retail and leisure, Audoo offers a transparent, modern and mutually beneficial approach to music licensing.

How it works

The Audoo Audio Meter™ plugs into a standard wall socket and automatically identifies songs played within a business premise. All data is encrypted, anonymised and securely transmitted to IMRO, ensuring full GDPR compliance and complete privacy for business owners, staff and customers.

Benefits for business owners and IMRO members

For licence holders:
• Simplifies music reporting
• Reduces administrative workload
• Provides transparency on how licence fees support music creators For IMRO members:
• Enables more precise, timely royalty payments
• Delivers real-world, real-time usage data If you play music publicly in your business, you must hold a music licence under Irish copyright law. To purchase your licence, visit www.imro.ie/paynow. To request an Audio Meter for your venue, contact: everyplaycounts@audoo.com.

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It’s the Most Wonderful Time of year!

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 12:30:00 +0000

Following on from our Halloween post, we thought it would be interesting to share what we’ve seen during the festive period in public performance over the last few years.

We’ll answer all the questions you didn’t know you had such as:

When does the festive season start in public performance?
Which types of places play the most Christmas music?
Which country plays the most Christmas music?
Which decades are the most popular Christmas songs from?
Which Christmas songs are played all year around? (I was surprised to see there were quite a few!)

We’ll also reveal our first ever Public Performance Christmas Charts and compare our data with the UK Official Chart Company 2024 Christmas Chart that covers streaming and downloads.

When does the festive season start in public performance?

…or when is it acceptable to start playing Christmas music?

Over the last few years, we’ve seen that Christmas music accounts for up to 8% of all plays during December, but in Public Performance, we can say that the Christmas period officially starts on the 1st of November.

Which types of places play the most Christmas music?

…or where should I avoid if I’m a scrooge?

It’s not going to be a massive surprise if you’ve been out at this time of year to see that the retail sector tops the festive plays, with pubs, restaurants and accommodation close behind – again, it’s good to see this backed up by real-world data. An unexpected sector in the top five was healthcare (e.g. doctor surgeries and dentists) – they’re also getting into the festive spirit… in summary, you’re not going to avoid it I’m afraid!

Which country plays the most Christmas music?

As we have different numbers of Audio Meters installed in each country, we normalised the data across each country to allow a comparison, giving an average number of plays per premises we’re installed in.

We searched and asked ChatGPT – it cited various articles such as this that concluded that the UK is the most Christmassy country for streamed music. We’re pleased to say that we see the same trend in Public Performance with an average of 50% more plays per installation than other countries!

Which decades are the most popular Christmas songs from?

2025 has seen a big change in the top ten; whilst four of the ten are from the 60s/70s/80s, the remaining six are from the 2000s. So, this year it feels like premises are wanting to change things up a bit.

2024 had a different picture favouring older songs - only two of the top ten were from the 2000s:

Which Christmas songs are played all year around?

I found it surprising that during January to October we still see Christmas music getting played… If we zoom in on that period for 2025, you’ll see 0.01% – 0.04% of plays are Christmas music. The spike in July comes from Australia during their winter and it turns out some folk celebrate Christmas twice there, so again it’s fantastic to see that backed up by our data.

With that in mind, it’s not a surprise that Australia supplies nearly half of the Christmas plays outside of November and December.

The top Christmas songs played January – October 2025 were as follows - there are some classics, but a clear emphasis on dance and recent releases…

Rank	Name	Artist	Release Decade
1	I'm the Santa Claoz	AronChupa, Little Sis Nora	2020s
2	Can't Wait 'Til Christmas	Utada Hikaru	2010s
3	Once Upon a December	Christy Altomare	2010s
4	Fairytale of New York	Kirsty MacColl, The Pogues	1980s
5	Snowman	Sia	2010s
6	Moonlit Floor (Kiss Me) (Santa Baby Remix)	LISA	2020s
7	All I Want For Christmas Vs Limbo	Dj Ksa Officialx	2020s
8	A Nonsense Christmas	Sabrina Carpenter	2020s
9	You Make It Feel Like Christmas	Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani	2010s
10	Santa Claus Is Comin' to Town	Jessie J	2010s

The Public Performance Christmas Charts

For the first time, we can now reveal the Audoo Public Performance Christmas charts for 2025…

Top Ten Christmas Artists 2025

Rank	Artist	2024 Rank
1	Michael Bublé	↔️ 1
2	Kelly Clarkson	⬆️ 6
3	Ariana Grande	⬆️ 5
4	The Ronettes	⬆️ 9
5	Mariah Carey	⬇️ 2
6	Sia	⬆️ 8
7	Darlene Love	↔️ 7
8	Frank Sinatra	⬆️ 10
9	Sabrina Carpenter	⬆️ 38
10	Wham!	⬇️ 3

As you can see, some big movements this year but once again, Mickey Bubbles is number one... the man is relentless with his Christmas cheer!

Top Ten Christmas Songs 2025

The big movements in the artist chart are of course underpinned by the song charts - every song in the top ten has moved up this year!

Rank	Name	Artist	Release Decade	2024 Rank
1	Underneath the Tree	Kelly Clarkson	2010s	⬆️ 3
2	Sleigh Ride	The Ronettes	1960s	⬆️ 7
3	Santa Tell Me	Ariana Grande	2010s	⬆️ 4
4	Holly Jolly Christmas	Michael Bublé	2010s	⬆️ 19
5	Feliz Navidad	Jose Felivciano	1970s	⬆️ 17
6	A Nonsense Christmas	Sabrina Carpenter	2020s	⬆️ 53
7	Snowman	Sia	2010s	⬆️ 14
8	Last Christmas	Wham!	1980s	⬆️ 9
9	Mary's Boy Child	Boney M.	1970s	⬆️ 147
10	Merry Christmas	Ed Sheeran, Elton John	2020s	⬆️ 11

This year has been a bit different - what’s happened to Mariah? All I Want For Christmas Is You is sitting at number 17 in our charts! 😱

Despite publishing this exactly one week before Christmas, we’re confident the positions won’t change dramatically now – Kelly Clarkson has been the clear leader from the start…

UK Official Charts 2024

Finally, as a bonus and because the 2025 charts have not been published yet, we thought it would be interesting to compare our 2024 chart to the UK Official Chart Company 2024 Christmas Chart that covers streaming and download music services. While eight out of the top ten are the same, the popularity is different and we can see a couple of older songs in our top ten. As we see all year-round, catalogue songs are popular and generate considerable commercial value in Public Performance.

Rank	Name	Artist	Release Decade	Streaming Chart Rank
1	All I Want For Christmas Is You	Mariah Carey	1990s	2
2	Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree	Brenda Lee	1960s	4
3	Underneath the Tree	Kelly Clarkson	2010s	7
4	Santa Tell Me	Ariana Grande	2010s	8
5	Do They Know It's Christmas?	Band Aid	1980s	9
6	Driving Home For Christmas	Chris Rea	1980s	19
7	Sleigh Ride	The Ronettes	1960s	15
8	Fairytale of New York	Kirsty MacColl, The Pogues	1980s	6
9	Last Christmas	Wham!	1980s	1
10	Jingle Bell Rock	Bobby Helms	1950s	5

Merry Christmas!

That's it... we hope you've enjoyed a look into our Public Performance Christmas data and how it differs from streaming charts. We'll be back in the new year with more data stories.

All that remains is for me to wish you all a Merry Christmas from us all at Audoo!

Cheers!

Steve Robbins, CTO

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Halloween Song Popularity

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 10:22:00 +0000

As Halloween nears, we thought it would be fun to look at our public performance data and see how the top Halloween songs are played throughout the year… are they consistently played or are they only played in October?

We couldn’t find a canonical Halloween song chart, so what we asked a friendly neighbourhood AI chatbot to work its magic and give us a top ten. We’ve added the public performance ranking for the song as well.

Rank	Name	Artist	Pub Perf #
1	Thriller	Michael Jackson	2
2	Monster Mash	Bobby "Boris" Pickett	9
3	Ghostbusters	Ray Parker Jr.	5
4	Spooky, Scary Skeletons	Andrew Gold	10
5	Somebody's Watching Me	Rockwell	4
6	This Is Halloween	Disney Characters	8
7	I Put a Spell On You	Screamin' Jay Hawkins	7
8	Werewolves of London	Warren Zevon	3
9	Pet Sematary	The Ramones	6
10	Zombie	The Cranberries	1

We have a few ways to look at the play data over time. There are some simple metrics like number of plays or listeners per day, but we also track derivative data - one of which we call “Hotness”. Hotness measures how much activity the song is generating each week, so can also indicate recent popularity. To gauge how much the songs are played year-round, we will use this metric.

Let’s take a look at our Hotness metric for each of the songs in the chart and see whether these songs are played in public performance all year long or just around Halloween...

1. Thriller - Michael Jackson

Public Performance Rank: 2

Looking at Hotness, we can see the song has a huge peak at the end of October last year, but does have playback throughout the year:

Verdict: 🗓 Perennial Pop

2. Monster Mash - Bobby "Boris" Pickett

Public Performance Rank: 9

As this song is far less popular in public performance settings than Thriller, we have less data and therefore don’t see such a defined spike:

Verdict: 🎃 Ghastly Groove

3. Ghostbusters - Ray Parker Jr.

Public Performance Rank: 5

Verdict: 🗓️ Nonstop Knockout

4. Spooky, Scary Skeletons - Andrew Gold

Public Performance Rank: 10

Verdict: 🎃 Bone-Rattling Ballad

5. Somebody's Watching Me - Rockwell

Public Performance Rank: 4

Verdict: 🎃 Monster Melody

6. This Is Halloween - Disney Characters

Public Performance Rank: 8

Verdict: 🎃 Graveyard Groove

7. I Put a Spell On You - Screamin' Jay Hawkins

Public Performance Rank: 7

Verdict: 🎃 Bone-Rattling Ballad

8. Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon

Public Performance Rank: 7

We can see that this song is played all year around, more than the other songs so far

Verdict: 🗓️ Everyday Earworm

9. Pet Sematary - The Ramones

Public Performance Rank: 6

This is the first song on the chart which is played consistently all-year-around. There is a spike at the end of October, but it’s not that pronounced…

Verdict: 🗓️ Nonstop Knockout

10. Zombie - The Cranberries

Public Performance Rank: 1

As might be expected for the top-ranking public performance song, we can see lots of plays all year around!

Verdict: 🗓️ All-Season Smash

So... despite the title, is this even a Halloween song? 😱

Steve Robbins, CTO

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Let’s Compare the TikTok Songs of the Summer 2025 UK and US Charts with What We've Seen in the Largest Ever Set of Public Performance Data

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 10:51:00 +0000

Introduction

TikTok recently released their Songs of the Summer 2025, so following the interest in our last post comparing public performance to the UK Radio and Official Charts, we wanted to see how TikTok’s charts stack up against our public performance data.

Huge Differences

Starting at a high-level, the comparison is a little limited since TikTok have only released a top ten chart for certain countries. For this analysis we're concentrating on the UK and US as two major music markets. The TikTok Songs of the Summer charts define ‘summer’ as May to August, so we've use that same timeframe.

I expected the differences to be noticeable - after all, TikTok fuels viral moments while businesses curate a soundtrack to create their sound. But the gap was even bigger than expected: not a single song in TikTok’s UK or US top ten appeared in our respective public performance charts!

In fact, you'll see below that I had to search our top 100,000 tracks to find some of the TikTok songs and even then I couldn't find playback for one of them. So unfortunately, I couldn’t even make a nice overlap chart as it would just have zeros on it 😆.

As with the comparison to streaming and radio charts, this again tells us that public listening is its own ecosystem. It's great to see that this statement holds up in the US as well as the UK.

UK Charts

When comparing the Top 40 UK data for the first half of 2025, we found that public performance had a diverse range of release decades, with 40% of songs originating from previous decades, though the top ten was entirely from the 2020’s.

Sadly, since TikTok has only released a top ten for these charts, we couldn’t dig as deeply into the differences. But we can say that outside of the top ten, we do see older songs getting a huge numbers of plays.

The TikTok top ten for the UK features five songs from the 2020s, followed by three from 2010s, then one from each of the 2000s and 1990s:

The Public performance top ten for the UK is all from the 2020s:

US Charts

Next up, something new - a first look at our US data and how that compares to TikTok.

The data here shows a very different picture to the UK - and although we only looked at the top ten, we can see a stronger preference for older songs than the UK during this period.

The TikTok top ten for the US features five decades of music with the 2010s coming out on top:

The Public performance top ten for the US shows a mix from this century and some classics from the 1970s that we saw in the UK Top 40 analysis - Dreams by Fleetwood Mac and Lovely Day by Bill Withers:

The Charts

As there was no overlap between the TikTok and Public Performance top ten charts, it felt like the best way to present the data was as side-by-side charts.

UK Top Ten

Position	Public Performance	Release Year	TikTok	Release Year	Public Performance Position
1	Pink Pony Club - Chappell Roan	2023	Hold My Hand - Jess Glynne	2015	933
2	Ordinary - Alex Warren	2025	Soul Survivor ft. Akon - Jeezy	2005	58,126
3	Nice To Meet You - Myles Smith	2024	Let Down - Radiohead	1997	15,147
4	Stargazing - Myles Smith	2024	Rock That Body - Black Eyed Peas	2010	6,320
5	I Had Some Help - Morgan Wallen, Post Malone	2024	Tyrant - Beyoncé & Dolly Parton	2024	25,102
6	Bad Dreams - Teddy Swims	2024	Your Love Is My Drug - Kesha	2010	5,492
7	A Bar Song (Tipsy) - Shaboozey	2024	Illegal - PinkPantheress	2025	491
8	The Door - Teddy Swims	2023	Shake It To The Max (Fly) - Moliy, Shenseea, Skillibeng, Silent Addy	2024	4,092
9	Love Me Not - Ravyn Lenae	2024	Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter	2025	44
10	Beautiful Things - Benson Boone	2024	Dior ft. Chrystal - MK	2025	163

US Top Ten

Position	Public Performance	Release Year	TikTok	Release Year	Public Performance Position
1	Too Sweet - Hozier	2024	Hold My Hand - Jess Glynne	2015	410
2	Lovely Day - Bill Withers	1977	Soul Survivor ft. Akon - Jeezy	2005	9,289
3	Can't Stop - Red Hot Chili Peppers	2002	Rock That Body - Black Eyed Peas	2010	7,467
4	Float On - Modest Mouse	2004	Let Down - Radiohead	1997	16,480
5	Tieduprightnow - Parcels	2018	Whim Whamiee - Pluto & Ykniece	2025	10,978
6	Feel It Still - Portugal. The Man	2017	Pretty Little Baby - Connie Francis	1962	22,591
7	Dreams - Fleetwood Mac	1977	You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift	2008	8,226
8	back to friends - Sombr	2024	My Main ft. Ty Dolla $ign - Mila J	2014	98,362
9	Mr. Brightside - The Killers	2007	Your Love Is My Drug - Kesha	2010	1,890
10	Cinderella - Remi Wolf	2024	Mad Again - BunnaB	2025	No plays

In Summary

The takeaway? TikTok hits and public performance favourites are worlds apart. When comparing TikTok to Public Performance, we can see that the songs played are completely different. We can also see that at least during the summer months, the US and UK Public Performance plays are wildly different as well.

Steve Robbins, CTO

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UK Chart Comparison for January to June 2025

Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:31:00 +0000

Introduction

The UK Official Charts company recently released their chart for "the most-streamed and best-selling tracks of 2025 so far in the UK" covering January to end of June 2025. It’s the definitive view of what people have been listening to privately - on headphones, at home, or on the go.

But until now, there’s been a major gap in our understanding of music consumption when it comes to what people are actually listening to in public.

Historically, accurately tracking public performance plays at scale - the music played in bars, cafés, shops, gyms, hotels, and other public venues - has been near impossible. Without precise data, a true public performance “chart” simply didn’t exist. Trends could only be estimated, based on anecdote or proxy measures like radio plays.

That’s all changed. Thanks to our Audio Meters – now installed across UK venues, we’ve created the largest (and growing), most accurate dataset of public performance plays ever compiled. For the first time, it’s possible to map out what’s soundtracking our shared public spaces and compare it directly to streaming and radio consumption.

This is ground-breaking work, and the results are fascinating. Public Performance has its own rhythm, shaped by the atmosphere venues want to create and the audiences they serve. Some differences are obvious when you consider them - funnily enough, far less parental-advisory content is played in public places compared to streaming, and way more timeless "classics" from decades past. Others are surprising, revealing how cultural moments, live tours, and viral trends seep into the music we hear around us.

So, we decided to do something that’s never been done before: put the UK’s first public performance Top 40 side-by-side with the Official UK Charts and Radio airplay rankings – and see just how different the worlds of streaming, radio, and public listening really are.

Overlaps

Starting at a high-level, the differences are clear. When we line up the three charts, the overlaps are far smaller than you might expect:

Just over half of the songs from public performance appear in the UK Official Chart (22 out of 40) or UK Radio charts (21 out of 40).

When comparing the UK Official Chart and Radio chart, 26 out of 40 songs are the same:

This tells us something important: public listening is not just a slower version of the streaming or radio charts - it’s an entirely different ecosystem.

Recent vs Classic songs

One of the clearest differences comes from looking at release dates. As hinted above, part of the reason for the small overlap is the playing of more "classic" songs, reflecting the fact that venue playlists are often built for mood and familiarity as much as novelty.

This can be seen if we take a look at the release dates in the charts: The Top 40 UK Radio Chart content is 100% from the 2020s:

The Top 40 Official Streaming and Download Chart content is almost entirely from the 2020s, with one song from the 2000s and one from the 1990s:

Public performance content is far more diverse with only 60% (24 songs) from the 2020s, and the rest stretching back across every decade from the 1960s onwards:

Digging a bit deeper, we see that 87% of the Radio Chart (35 songs) and 82% of the Official Chart (33 songs) are from the last year alone, compared to only 34% of the public performance data (17 songs):

That balance, between fresh hits and enduring favourites, is part of what makes the public performance chart so unique, and why it’s never looked like anything we’ve seen before.

Trends

That isn't to say that the good folk selecting their tunes for public performance are not keeping an eye on trends - Bruce Springsteen made it into the public performance Top 30 with Dancing in the Dark, where we can see more plays around May ahead of the concerts he played in the UK.

At the other end of the scale for generational trends, 90s hit There She Goes by The La's topped this TikTok chart and we can see it features at number 34 in the public performance data. Similarly, Dreams by Fleetwood Mac has been big on TikTok over the last year and came in at number 37.

None of these songs are in the Official Streaming or Radio charts, proving that public performance charts are not simply “catching up” to other platforms but following their own distinct path.

Classics

You'll see that there are loads more classic songs played in pubs, bars, hotels, restaurants and other premises that just aren't represented by streaming or radio playback. The public performance Top 40 includes some big artists as they are played more, but there is always huge long-tail of songs we recognise.

But here’s the groundbreaking part: even these chart-toppers are just the tip of the iceberg. Our public performance Top 40 songs only represent 2.2% of all the plays we saw during the first half of the year - meaning there are millions of plays for smaller artists that just wouldn't be recognised without our Audio Meters!

Without our Audio Meter data, this long-tail of music would remain completely invisible – and the artists behind those songs wouldn’t get the recognition or royalties they deserve.

The Charts

Now, without further ado, here are the songs that made up the first half of 2025 across the UK Official Charts, Radio and public performance plays. You can click the column headers to sort by the chart positions and explore the relative positions across the charts...

Summary

For years, music charts have been defined by streaming, physical/digital sales, & radio play. Public performance - the soundtrack to our shared spaces - has never had a seat at the table.

Now, for the first time in history, we can measure it accurately. And as these charts show, it’s a world all of its own: a blend of current hits, cultural touchpoints, and enduring classics that you won’t find replicated anywhere else.

I hope you've enjoyed digging into these charts…It turns out that public performance, streaming, radio play and physical sales are really nothing alike!

Steve Robbins, CTO

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Privacy and Security at Audoo

Thu, 29 May 2025 17:14:59 +0000

Following up from the Architecture Overview post, this post goes into more detail on how our Audio Meters securely recognise music whilst respecting the privacy of the venues we're installed in. Given the Audio Meter has microphones front and centre of its design, it's a question we often get asked far too often!

Privacy

Hopefully you are familiar with smart speakers such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and the associated technologies built into televisions where you can ask that your lights to be turned on or favourite playlist played. With the convenience of these devices came privacy concerns once people realised that the microphones are always listening for voice commands. The speakers typically have a small amount of processing on the speaker that detects the "wake words" (i.e. "Hey Google...", or "Alexa..."), but once those words are detected, the recorded audio is typically sent to the vendor's cloud to determine what action to take. As smart speakers are interested in what has been spoken so they can take the appropriate action, they actively work to remove echos, music and other background noise to isolate voice frequencies.

Our Audio Meters, on the other hand, operate in the opposite way to smart speakers. They are not interested in conversations – in fact, conversations can actually get in the way of music recognition! We've designed the Audio Meter with privacy at its core and as part of that, it actively works to remove conversational noise (e.g. think loud talking or singing in a busy bar or restaurant) to get to the underlying music.

The Audio Meter also does not continuously use the microphones – instead, we take a short sample every few seconds for music identification. A further key difference is that no audio is sent to our cloud - we do all the audio processing on the Audio Meter. We then run machine learning models on the sound to reduce noise and isolate the music before we perform the final step of creating an acoustic fingerprint. The fingerprint is a short representation of the acoustic characteristics within the audio that is sent securely to our cloud for recognition. In summary, we have no way of hearing what is happening in the venues where we are installed.

Security

One key principle of security is to operate "defence in depth" - this essentially means having multiple layers of security to prevent, detect and respond to threats. Our Audio Meters and cloud platform were designed and built with industry-leading security standards in mind. We've implemented robust development processes and ongoing measures to ensure their integrity, and we continue to regularly review and strengthen these systems.

Here are some of the practical outcomes for our Audio Meters:

The Audio Meters are locked down so they cannot be connected to by an attacker to allow them access to the memory storing the audio - either on a local network or through a cable.
They only connect to our cloud platform and use industry-standard secure communications to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks or other spoofing.
The software on Audio Meters is securely controlled by Audoo and locked with private keys that are stored on the Audio Meter in our factory, so rogue software can never be accepted and installed during over the air upgrades or through direct access.

In our cloud platform, we get many security advantages from hosting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as physical data centre security, ISO27001 certification for key infrastructure and many services to develop with. Without getting too technical about it, here are the key features we use in our cloud platform to ensure security of the data we gather:

Audit logging providing compliance and risk auditing
Identity and access control – lock down access to defined user accounts and roles
Secure networking and firewalls locking down network traffic and logging access
Data segregation and end-user roles ensuring access to data is restricted
Data Encryption – all data is transmitted over encrypted connections and all data stored is encrypted on disk

We made a short video that shows our approach to privacy and security:

I hope this post helped explain how our Audio Meters operate while respecting the privacy of venues we're installed in.

If you have questions, please get in touch...

Cheers,
Steve

Steve Robbins CTO

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Music stars who have invested in UK tech companies

Thu, 03 Apr 2025 13:27:52 +0000

Many household stars in music have used their influence, platform and wealth to invest in tech companies based in the UK.

From members of the Beatles, ABBA and Muse to KSI and Kylie, a number of world-famous musicians have invested in music tech, FinTechs, religious apps and more.

BusinessCloud looks at some of the most well-known investments.

Muse’s Matt Bellamy

Muse frontman Matt Bellamy is a serial tech investor. Despite putting money into many companies overseas, most notably in San Francisco, the Cambridge-born rock star still has investments closer to home. He invested in London-based startup Bloomsbury AI before exiting when the firm was sold to Facebook in 2018.

The Hysteria singer is also a founding partner of Helium-3 Ventures, which invested in Engineered Arts, a humanoid robotics design and manufacturing company, which was founded in Cornwall.

After a $10m Series A funding round led by Helium-3 in December, Bellamy joined the firm as an ‘observer’ as it restructured to a US entity.

Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart

One half of Eurythmics, Dave Stewart not only has a background in tech investment, but was creative director at mobile platform Ideas Britain. The platform was set up to become a ‘virtual version of Dragons’ Den’, giving professional advice and financial backing to new thinking across a range of sectors, and raised £270,000 on Crowdcube back in 2015. Its website is now dormant.

For the man whose band had hit single Sweet Dreams, it was surprisingly music rights FinTech Salt that gained his backing in February 2024.

Stewart joined ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus in investing in the platform which streamlines music rights and royalties.

ABBA’s Bjorn Ulvaeus

Singer-songwriter Ulvaeus invested in Salt less than a year after his Swedish song data startup Session – founded in 2019 with Swedish songwriters and record producers Max Martin and Niclas Molinder – was acquired by the UK firm.

Legendary late producer Quincy Jones and Canadian songwriter-producer Dan Kurtz are also investors in Salt.

Ulvaeus also co-founded Pophouse Entertainment with EQT founder Conni Jonsson, a Sweden-based music investment firm which raised €1bn for its debut fund in April 2025.

One of the largest first-time private equity funds to be raised in Europe in the last decade, Pophouse said it secured an additional €200m through dedicated co-investment vehicles. The fund will be used to acquire music catalogues and IP.

Sir Elton John & Sir Paul McCartney

Another firm backed by Ulvaeus is music tech company Audoo, which has attracted investment from true UK music royalty in Sir Elton John and Sir Paul McCartney.

Sir Elton’s most famous venture outside of music is arguably when he became chairman of Watford FC – but he has still drifted into different industries, including UK tech.

He followed Beatle Sir Paul in investing in Audoo as part of a £4.1m funding round in October 2023.

The London-based company aims to help artists to receive fairer royalty payments.

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Audoo x Measure of Music 2025

Sun, 16 Mar 2025 14:21:00 +0000

The last weekend in February saw the 5th instalment of Measure of Music, a virtual event celebrating music, tech & data in a weekend long conference and hackathon. The event attracted a diverse group of speakers and participants from a variety of backgrounds, from 71 countries and 17 time-zones around the world - this year was bigger than ever!

Audoo is proud to have sponsored this year’s event, and to kick-off the weekend by speaking about the importance of accurate public performance data within the music industry, and how it enables accurate distribution of performance royalties to artists, writers and rightsholders (watch replay). It was a pleasure to provide real-world data collected from our Audio Meters across four territories and three continents.

A huge thanks goes to our engineering team, who dedicated their weekends to help and mentor participants throughout the weekend wherever possible. It was impressive to see so many participants committed to their projects and delivering the best pitches they could after a gruelling 48 hours. Hearing teams discuss how public performance data can be used to train models and add value to artist marketing/audience development strategies was especially pleasing!

Congratulations to the winning team (Team 6) for their pitch on Gigatlas, a platform for simplified data-driven tour planning. Gigatlas was proposed as a one-stop-shop helping artists plan tours based on audience data, venue location and predicted travel costs. A great initiative for independent and emerging artists, and another example where Audoo public performance data could be used to identify and validate potential audiences.

For example, if Luminate and Chartmetric data help to identify audiences using streaming data, Audoo public performance data can help to validate these audiences and propose new ones based on the traction of track/artist plays by within industry sectors and commercial premises.

Understanding where and when music is consumed in the commercial sector can help to surface data-driven insights, and identify new potential audiences or placements for artists.

Well done again to everyone involved – organisers, participants, mentors and speakers. We look forward to seeing what's in store for next year's event.

If you’re a creator, rightsholder or PRO/CMO interested in hearing how we can support you - head to our solutions pages or reach out for a demo.
If you want a deeper dive into our technology - check out this system architecture blog from our CTO Steve Robbins.

Hash Riaz,

Head of Product

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Audoo partners with GEMA on Music Impact Study

Thu, 13 Mar 2025 16:09:44 +0000

This utilisation of Audoo Audio Meters™ adds to the tech company's portfolio of international business partners on a mission to revolutionise public performance royalties for music creators, licensees and businesses.

Music technology company Audoo partnered with GEMA, the German performing rights society, on its Music Impact Study as part of the PROs multi-faceted research quantifying the commercial value of background music in gastronomy and retail spaces, with Audoo technology recognising real-time songplay contributing to sales uplift.

Audoo Audio Meters – music recognition hardware – installed in hundreds of venues recognised over 130k tracks contributing to the insights demonstrating that the use of background music increased sales in retail by an average of 8% and in gastronomy by an average of 5.4% – the economic benefits suggesting that a music license is a worthwhile investment.

Overall, the most-played song in the Retail sample was 'Lifeline' by German artist Glockenbach featuring Ella Henderson and in the Gastronomy sample, 'Austin' by US artist Dasha. The other leading track of domestic repertoire was 'Wave' by Fast Boy and Raf (most-played song of the Gastronomy sample) and the top domestic artists overall were Trettmann (Retail sample) and Michael Schulte (Gastronomy sample). Further topline stats are below.

GEMA's Music Impact Study was a large-scale study that took place under the direction of international scientists with the connection between music and sales examined using several methodologies – the empirical field study at the point-of-sale was preceded by extensive literature research, quantitative surveys and expert interviews.

In addition to the trends and insights revealed through Audoo's intelligent client dashboard, the device's simple plug-and-play self-installation process at venues, plus its GDPR-compliance, demonstrates the value of this technology to retail and hospitality businesses.

The success of the Music Impact Study underscores the value of precise music usage tracking and its potential impact on businesses.

Sonja Schoenfeld, Project Manager of the Music Impact Study at GEMA, said: "The real-time dataset we were able to gather and analyse via Audoo technology on this study is great for seeing the overall impact of music in commercial spaces in such detail."

Johannes Everding, Director of Business Development at GEMA commented: "Audoo's innovative technology ensured a seamless and highly-effective data collection process and the results mark a significant milestone in understanding the commercial value of music with these kinds of insights for the benefit of businesses and rightsholders alike."

Ryan Edwards, CEO and Founder of Audoo added: "Partnering with GEMA on this study is a testament to the power of real-world data in demonstrating the impact of music in public spaces. As we continue to work with like-minded partners who share Audoo values of making public performance recognition and reporting more accurate and transparent, the landscape for all parties evolves and improves."

GEMA Music Impact Study

Overall Top Songs recognised by Audoo

Retail Sample

1. 'Lifeline' by Glockenbach ft. Ella Henderson

2. 'Cynical' by Chris de Sarandy, Safari Duo, twocolours

3. 'The Feeling' by Lost Frequencies

4. 'Angel Eyes' by Ásdís

5. 'Strangers' by Kenya Grace

Gastronomy Sample

1. 'Austin' by Dasha'

2. A Bar Song (Tipsy)' by Shaboozey

3. 'Belong Together' by Mark Ambor

4. 'Wave' by FAST BOY, Raf

5. 'Dancing In The Flames' by The Weeknd

Top Domestic Tracks recognised by Audoo

Retail Sample

1. 'Lifeline' by Glockenbach ft. Ella Henderson

2. 'Cynical' by Chris de Sarandy, Safari Duo, twocolours

3. 'I'll Be There' by Rita Ora, Robin Schulz, Tiago PZK

4. 'Waterfall' by Michael Shulte, R3HAB

5. 'Holding On' by Leony

Gastronomy Sample

1. 'Wave' by FAST BOY, Raf

2. 'Human Being' by Nico Santos

3. 'Friends' by KAMRAD
4. 'Beautiful Reason' by Michael Shulte

5. 'Someday Soon' by ClockClock

Top Domestic Artists recognised by Audoo

Retail Sample

1. Michael Shulte

2. Leony

3. Glockenbach

4. ClockClock

5. Zoe Wees

Gastronomy Sample

1. Trettmann

2. Bläck Fööss

3. Nico Santos

4. Purple Disco Machine

5. FAST BOY

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As PRO Inquiries Continue In Washington, Audoo Shares Some Shocking Song-Tracking Data from Denver

Sat, 08 Mar 2025 14:39:16 +0000

While mega-PROs like ASCAP and BMI do a laudable job of tracking, matching, and distributing royalties on billions of tracks played in the United States, a nagging question is whether these vast systems can be improved. This is more than just an academic musing: the answer to this surprisingly complex question has the potential to reshape the public performance sphere for decades to come.

Enter Audoo CEO Ryan Edwards, who is driven by a mission to count every song played worldwide in public places for years — and is marching towards that goal with backers like Bjorn Ulvaeus and Sir Elton John. Theoretically, the tech exists to count everything with total accuracy, though the details are devilish. Accordingly, Edwards and his team have spent millions developing the ‘Audio Meter’ and deployed it into thousands of venues and public places worldwide to capture the music in action.

That effort is now hitting the United States. Just recently, Audoo concluded a far-reaching first entry to the US in Denver involving hundreds of public places – with nearly 100% of songs played in those establishments tracked. That included restaurants, gyms, bars, and retail establishments across the city.

“The feedback from the license holders was very supportive,” Edwards told DMN. “Many of them have wondered for years how their fees are distributed and were very passionate about the way music sets the tone of their businesses.”

The results of the Audoo pilot, shared with Digital Music News and part of an ongoing partnership, began in late June of 2024 and concluded in February of this year.

Among the most refreshing takeaways is that virtually every song can be successfully detected, logged, and tallied with all key metadata information (including ISRC & ISWC) using the installed Audio Meters, which makes sense. Imagine an industrial-scale, private version of Shazam in every venue, and you’ve captured Audoo’s business approach.

“Music has always been consumed in so many different ways, from business owners creating a ‘mixtape’ CD or playlist, playing the radio, and empowering employees to adjust the music based on the tone they need,” Edwards said. “To us, it’s about what’s been played and then reporting that accurately. Just get the music playing, and we’ll work with the PRO/CMO to do the rest.” But what’s actually getting played? Here’s where things start to get really interesting. The current thinking is that music played in public spaces roughly mirrors popular playlists on media like terrestrial radio and streaming platforms.

But Audoo’s data shows a surprisingly slim overlap with massive DSPs (i.e., Digital Service Providers or streaming platforms) and social media platforms.

Here’s just a quick look at the overlap – or complete lack thereof.

The following breakdown was pulled from a sample week in February (2025) using the top 40 songs tracked throughout the city. It was then compared to the top 40 songs played on other platforms for the same period.

What’s the overlap percentage? Take a look.

Audoo x Apple Music – 0% crossover

Audoo x Billboard – 2.5% crossover

Audoo x Shazam – 5% crossover

Audoo x Spotify – 5 % crossover

Audoo x TikTok – 0% crossover

“The results mirror what we have seen and reports in other markets around the world,” Edwards shared. “The more US cities we launch into, the more diverse [data] we expect to see. This can make a difference in thousands of creators making a living, or sadly, not.”

Also surprising: most of the music played in Denver hails from the United States (more than 50%) and the UK (nearly 15%). Other countries were marginal single-digit contributors, including Australia, France, Germany, and Sweden. Those percentages are likely different in other cities, though Audoo also highlighted some interesting exceptions.

Denver bar and restaurant Señor Bear, for example, plays a blend of Latin-inspired music from Argentina, Puerto Rico, Colombia, and Spain. The curated playlist also includes 24% American music sourced from local artists.

That’s a far cry from the top 10 list of most-played artists throughout the city, which includes Tame Impala, Jungle, Hozier, Taylor Swift, Morgan Wallen, The Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Bad Bunny, Zach Bryan, and Neil Frances. Sounds like tried-and-true stuff, though many of the most–played songs aren’t topping the charts on radio or Spotify.

The data also offers a range of other insights, including detailed breakdowns by venue type (restaurant or gym, for example) and the most frequently played songs. Audoo even tracks the level of commonality between different venue types, while identifying unique establishments (for example, a physical therapy clinic that is also a local music champion).

“Business owners know first hand the value of playing music, and of those we have started working with in the US, the feedback has been very positive,” Edwards shared. “Nobody challenges paying for a music license, despite the complexities of multiple PROs in the US. But knowing the hard-earned money is being paid to the artists they play is key.”

“Our technology is there to help PROs: no more manual surveys, proxy data sets, or outdated analogies. The past cannot be changed, but now is the time for accurate reporting for fair and transparent distributions.”

But what does this have to do with Congressional inquiries into PROs currently happening in Washington?

Just recently, the US Copyright Office launched a significant inquiry into PROs in response to Congressional concerns. Among the many questions being examined is how PROs gather performance information and how this impacts rights owners.

For Edwards, it’s a complex question with a surprisingly simple answer: just count everything!

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Audoo System Architecture

Fri, 07 Mar 2025 10:00:00 +0000

I’d like to introduce you to the technology we’ve built entirely in-house at Audoo over the last few years and give you a flavour of some of the technology choices our team has made along the way. We’ll be following up in the future with more detail on various aspects of how we do things - design, security and privacy, automated testing and some specialised projects and partnerships.

Platform

The cloud platform is centre of everything we do at here Audoo, securely gathering data from our Audio Meters to identify tracks being played, capturing analytics and metrics to ensure operational health, aggregating world-first data for reports and delivery to partners through dashboards and file transfer.

The platform itself is hosted with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and has been built with Clojure. We love Clojure as it’s quick and enjoyable to get work done, produces efficient code and is great for working with and transforming data. The platform has been designed using the "microservices" architectural approach, meaning we divide the overall platform into smaller parts (a “microservice”), each of which are responsible for a specific area.

For example, we have individual microservices for user account management, analytics event capture, identifying fingerprints, Audio Meter health checking and so on. Using this architectural technique works really well for our needs, allowing scaling of areas that need more processing power when needed and rapidly iterating on features separately.

The platform has over 25 individual microservices so far, all sharing a common design pattern for monitoring, logging, deployment and the APIs they expose – allowing us to concentrate on the functionality rather than the infrastructure. The microservices are tested in isolation as part of our Continuous Delivery process to ensure quality before deployment, then also as part of regular platform tests that drive alerts in Slack and our status page that we host publicly at https://status.audoo.com/

Audio Meters

The public face of our technology is of course our Audio Meter™, which has been many years in the making. We’ve had dozens of iterations on the external housing and the internal circuit board to get to the reliable, manufacturable, sleek and easy-to-install version that we now manufacture here in the UK.

An early prototype circuit board that was used to prove the concept can be seen below, measuring over 30cm², with microphones sticking out on the edges. The team worked long and hard with external specialists to get to the multi-layer board, of which we have now built thousands measuring approx. 10cm² x 4.5cm² with the microphones directly on the board.

We’ll come back to our manufacturing process in a future post – covering the testing we put every board through as it’s built and assembled into the finished Audio Meter. We love data and visibility of it, so we have real-time test results from our factory on an internal manufacturing dashboard where we can see boards at each test stage and the detailed test results as the factory run through the process. Below you can see a board that has failed on the second testing stage as well as an example of the detail captured in the audio test stage.

The embedded software that controls the Audio Meter is developed in a combination of Python, C and C++. The design goals for the software are to ensure reliability, privacy, security, simplicity and robustness, all while using as little power as possible – in fact, our Audio Meters consume less power than a standard USB phone charger. Our aim is for the Audio Meter to be plugged in and for it to “just work”… we have cellular connectivity inside, so as soon as it has power we can connect to our cloud platform and get recognising.

Operating in the opposite way to smart speakers (that need to isolate and recognise voice commands that are spoken), we want to remove speech and noise from the audio to isolate the music being played. As part of this audio processing, we run a machine learning model on the Audio Meter to give a probability score on whether music is playing or not, capture sound levels and other metrics. The audio from microphones is never stored on the Audio Meter, nor is it sent to our cloud platform. We instead generate and send an “acoustic fingerprint” to our cloud to match and identify the music that is playing - this ensures privacy for the venues we are installed in. As part of our reliably efforts – for example, working around occasionally poor reception – Audio Meters are capable of offline fingerprinting, where they store the fingerprints securely to retry until we know they have been received by our cloud platform. In a future post, we’ll go into detail on the automated testing and checks we carry out when releasing software updates for the Audio Meters around the world.

Dashboards and Apps

You will have seen a few screenshots of our internal web dashboard in this blog - we use this tool to manage venues and installations, provide support, diagnose and fix problems, manage catalogue metadata, get ad-hoc reports / insights and so much more. We use Ionic that allows the same codebase to be used to also provide a mobile app that is used by installation partners. We’re immensely proud of our internal tooling and always get great feedback when demoing to partners and investors. Last year we also launched an externally accessible dashboard for partners to use, which allows users to dive into reports and real-world data insights from all over the globe.

Our design process is lightweight but effective – moving from understanding the product requirements to wireframes, to hi-fidelity click-through demos in Figma. Once the team has agreed the flow, our cloud and data team work on APIs that are marked up as comments on the design in parallel with the UI build-out.

Reporting and Data

As our central product is reporting the music played to our partners, naturally a huge part of our platform centres around processing the millions of analytics events we receive every day to build out the reports. We make use of several AWS services to drive this - central to this is a Redshift data warehouse, with a Kinesis stream providing real-time on data, then Step Functions, Elastic Map Reduce and loading / reporting code to process batch runs overnight. As catalogue data is constantly updated and improved, during report delivery, we take a “snapshot” copy of the data being delivered to ensure analytics dashboards are based on the same data delivered to partners. We load and transform data to enable our dashboard insight use cases through a Postgres caching database to give the performance we need for these views.

Summary

I’m incredibly proud of the team and what we’ve built at Audoo over the last few years – taking Ryan’s vision from a proof of concept to a super reliable product that we’re rolling out around the world.

I hope you enjoyed this introduction to what we’ve built and look out for more detailed follow up posts coming soon!

Cheers,
Steve

Steve Robbins CTO

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Tileyard The Secret Source Podcast

Thu, 06 Mar 2025 14:37:00 +0000

What does it take to go from musician to music-tech entrepreneur? Our CEO & founder, Ryan Edwards, sat down with Nick Keynes from Tileyard London on The Secret Source podcast to share his journey—from life as an artist to founding Audoo and driving change in the music industry.

BBC Radio London

Thu, 27 Feb 2025 14:28:00 +0000

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CNBC International - Converge

Tue, 25 Feb 2025 13:03:00 +0000

Audoo, a tech company founded by musician-turned-entrepreneur Ryan Edwards, is tackling one of the music industry’s long-standing challenges — ensuring artists receive accurate royalties for their music played in commercial locations.

The idea was born when Edwards heard his own music being played in a London department store, and he became curious about how royalties were being tracked and paid.

He said he uncovered a “huge problem with inaccuracy” and set about creating a solution in the shape of a small plug-in device which recognizes and registers music.

The old method consisted of manual surveys and radio data sampling, leaving much to be desired in terms of accuracy. Audoo’s devices provide a new level of precision, ensuring artists are paid for every play.

“This is in everything from gyms to retail locations, cafes. We’re in schools. We’re in nurseries, you name it. Anywhere that you hear music out and about, we are there,” Edwards told CNBC’s Converge.

The approach has attracted attention from some of the biggest names in the music world, with legendary musicians Sir Elton John and ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus investing in the company.

“The investment journey for us, like any startup, has been constant. Over the past five years, we’ve raised nearly £18 million ($22 million) into the business,” Ryan said.

Audoo’s data also reveal trends in how music is consumed in commercial settings.

“We can look at the geographical location of a premise, and we can start to group play data by geography. We can look at individual premises themselves. One of the most interesting parts is looking at industry sector types, grouping premises into fitness, food and drink, or retail,” said Hash Riaz, Audoo’s Head of Product.

“The key thing for us is we started with data to ensure people were getting paid correctly. But now, the next phase is helping artists, booking agents, and labels use that data for actionable intelligence,” Edwards said. Watch the video above for more on Audoo and how it’s supporting the music industry.

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Audoo and Metropolitan Pub Company Partner to Drive Accurate Music Royalty Distributions

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 13:35:00 +0000

Audoo and Metropolitan Pub Company Partner to Drive Accurate Music Royalty Distributions for Artists and Songwriters in UK Pubs.

Audoo, the music recognition technology company revolutionising public performance royalties, has announced a partnership with premium pub company Metropolitan Pub Company, to install Audoo Audio Meters™ in all of their pubs across major UK cities including London, Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bath and Cambridge. This partnership seeks to accelerate Audoo’s mission to establish accurate and transparent data collection from the music played in these venues.

Millions of pounds in royalties are lost annually, partly due to inaccurate music reporting in public spaces. Audoo’s Audio Meter™ addresses this by capturing precise data on music played, ensuring artists and songwriters are fairly compensated. For Metropolitan pubs, this partnership provides a robust solution to support both the music industry and their venues, allowing them to play music and support artists and songwriters with greater transparency and accuracy in royalty management.

For pubs playing music, having the right public performance licences in place together with accurate royalty reporting is critical, while also supporting the creative ecosystem. Music plays an integral role for customers, with research showing that almost 80% of people admit to staying in a venue longer if good music is playing, with a further 60% saying they would then spend more on food and drink. Music is also essential for staff, creating an enjoyable and engaging working experience.

As a prominent pub chain in the UK, Metropolitan Pub Company’s adoption of Audoo’s Audio Meter™ technology is poised to set a new benchmark for the industry, encouraging more venues to follow suit in both supporting artists and songwriters through accurate royalty reporting and ensuring they are providing high-quality music experiences that enhance the overall pub experience.

The GDPR-compliant devices, which don’t compromise on public privacy, are currently used in 15 countries across four continents to track and report songs played in public performance locations like cafes, bars, hair salons, restaurants, gyms and retail locations. This partnership is just the beginning, with Audoo and The Metropolitan Pub Company setting a new standard in music royalty reporting that could ripple across the hospitality sector.

Ryan Edwards, CEO of Audoo, commented: "We're thrilled to partner with The Metropolitan Pub Company to bring the Audoo Audio Meter™ to some of the most iconic pubs in the UK. Accurate royalty reporting is not just about fairness for artists and songwriters, but it also helps organisations like The Metropolitan Pub Company enhance their music offerings while meeting their licensing requirements. This sets a new standard in the hospitality industry and we help to encourage similar organisations to follow suit. Together, we're ensuring that music, one of the most important cultural elements of any social space, is properly valued and reported."

Kyle Miller, Operations Director at Metropolitan Pub Company, said: "At Metropolitan Pub Company, we understand the value that music brings to our pubs. It's not just background noise; it's a key part of the atmosphere we create for our guests and our staff. Working with Audoo ensures that we're supporting artists and songwriters by accurately reporting the music played in our venues, while also offering our customers and employees a great musical experience. We are delighted to partner with Audoo and help them expand their technology offering across the UK, bringing accurate reporting to every public performance location.”

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Should there be a ban on teenage popstars?

Mon, 28 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

After the death of Liam Payne at 31, music industry figures are debating the duty of care for artists who find fame at a young age - some have suggested an all-out ban might be the solution.

As tributes poured in following the death of the death of One Directon singer Liam Payne on 16 October, the machinations of the music industry stopped for a beat. Here was yet another musician who had experienced stratospheric levels of fame from a young age – Payne was 16 when his boyband was formed on the UK reality TV competition The X Factor in 2010 – which had a devastating impact on his mental health, and who used drink and drugs in a bid to self-medicate.

In a 2019 interview with Esquire Middle East, Payne explained the pressures of being constantly subjected to global public scrutiny: "It's mainly mentally where you struggle with it. It's the getting ready and always knowing that you might be photographed. I'll get days where I just don't want to leave my house. Even if it's just going to the shop… I would sweat because I wouldn't know whether I was doing the right thing or not." He added: "Unfortunately, it does happen to everybody in this industry."

The British songwriter Guy Chambers saw disturbing parallels between Payne's story and that of his former long-term musical partner, Robbie Williams – who joined the boyband Take That aged 16 in 1990. Williams suffered debilitating panic attacks from early on in his career, also leading to his own well-documented issues with addiction. In an interview with DJ Scott Mills in 2022 Williams said of that time: "[I was] doing my GCSEs, which I failed at, to then all of a sudden being in Japan and having 3,000 fans outside and then that being the case everywhere that we go. It was unsafe and it was surreal and that, mixed with what I was ingesting to cope with my life and the way that my body and mind reacts to it, didn't mix well."

Days after Payne's death, in an interview with The Observer, Chambers suggested that under-18s should be banned from becoming popstars. He said: "I do think putting a 16-year-old in an adult world like that is potentially really damaging… I know in Robbie's case, with Take That, there wasn't any proper protection set up to look after what were teenage boys. That was a long time ago, but I don't see much sign of change. There is not much more real care taken, that I have observed, from people involved in the big television talent shows. I would suggest that people should not be in a boyband until they are 18, and the industry should stick to that, too."

It's certainly an interesting proposal. With each shock death of another troubled artist who rose to fame at a young age, there are murmurs that "something needs to change" in the music industry, but then it's back to business as usual. Amy Winehouse – who studied at the Brit school aged 15 and was first signed to a record label aged 19 – achieved incredible success in her music career, but was subjected to traumatic treatment by the press as a young, female celebrity, and was troubled by addiction issues. She died from alcohol poisoning, aged 27, in 2011.

The Swedish DJ Avicii – real name Tim Bergling – had been releasing dance tunes from age 17, and documented his own experiences of anxiety along with a crippling touring schedule in his 2017 documentary, Avicii: True Stories. He struggled with opioid and alcohol addictions and killed himself, aged 28, in 2018. Aaron Carter, who released his first album aged nine, had a harrowing time for what was left of his childhood, had substance abuse issues, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in 2019, and died of an accidental drugs overdose aged 34, in 2022. Now in 2024, has anything improved when it comes to safeguarding or a duty of care towards young music stars?

'A damaging cycle'

The impact of fame at a young age is something that psychologist Dr Adi Jaffe has encountered over the years in his treatment of musicians, actors and DJs in the US. What's particularly troubling, he says, is that these young people are placed in an adult world that they're not equipped to deal with, mentally or physically.

"We leave these young, creative, often times shy and introverted artistic minds," he tells the BBC, "and we run them through a heavily incentivised capitalistic system and there's a lot of money to be made for a lot of people. And at first, it's charming, and the parties are great, the celebrities that come to meet you are wonderful too; you get to live this fantasy life, but as we've seen, there are many, many artists we know, and whose music we know, who struggle and who are caught in that same machine."

"I have worked with artists who have a schedule of about 150 to 200 performance dates a year," he says. "That means being on shuttles, buses and airplanes essentially every day of the year. They have no stable home environment, they're in constantly changing and completely different time zones, and they have to perform, but then need to sleep on a plane to rest for the next performance. These teens start relying on sleeping pills and stimulants to keep them up for the shows and it becomes an incredibly damaging cycle of inappropriate but necessary habits.

"Human brains are continually developing throughout childhood and adolescence – meaning they are more vulnerable to the extreme pressures and punishing workload of the popstar life. Jaffe says: "Children aren't formed enough in their resilience to be able to do this [punishing work schedule] day in and day out. When you perform at the frequency these kids are asked to do, you have to be willing to turn on the energy for the performance, regardless of your own level of mental health functioning. There's the emotional labour; the fatigue."

Additionally, he says that they miss out on other important developmental steps: "There is the importance of social connection in those younger age groups and the reality is that when you get pushed into the limelight in that way, you become incredibly isolated and your social life is almost taken away from you." Payne had previously spoken of the loneliness of life on the road leading to a dependency on alcohol, telling The Diary of a CEO podcast: "It feels like when we were in the band, the best way to secure us, because of how big it got, was just to lock us in our rooms and of course, what's in the room? Minibar. So, at a certain point, I thought 'Well I'm going to have a party for one' and that just seemed to carry on through many years of my life."

He added: "I spoke to somebody about this and in child development, as a teen, the one thing you need is freedom to make choices and freedom to do stuff… although we could do anything we wanted it seemed from the outside, that we were always locked in a room at night and then it would be car, hotel room, stage, sing, locked."

A call for change

The mental toll of working within the music world is a widespread problem for young artists, exemplified in a 2019 study that found that 80% of 18 to 25-year-old musicians questioned said they had negative mental health issues, with anxiety and depression being the most common. And further complications can arise for commercially successful stars, some of whom can experience a public crisis, due to their reliance on unhealthy coping mechanisms like alcohol and drugs becoming the stuff of headlines and social media discourse. Jaffe adds: "Young people need to be able to have the chance to stumble and fall and learn, without it being on a public stage." Stopping under-18s from entering the music industry is certainly one preventative measure, but could Chambers' idea for keeping teens out of the pop world really work in practise? Chris Herbert, a former pop music manager and creator of the Spice Girls, is dubious. "I honestly cannot see how you would implement a minimum age threshold to work in the entertainment industry," he tells the BBC. "It has a very long history of delivering successful stars of all ages, and there will always be a young market who want artists who are relatable."

Young artists and their guardians need to be fully informed and aware of the risks, as well as the rewards, that come alongside fame – Chris Herbert

However, Herbert, who is on the board at Audoo, a music company that ensures creatives are paid fairly for public performances of their music, has called for a change in the way the industry operates. "Rather than putting our efforts into stopping it," he says, "the answer should lie in creating the right education and support for young artists and making the industry a more transparent place. Young artists and their guardians need to be fully informed and aware of the risks, as well as the rewards, that come alongside fame and the industry needs to put some proper structural support around the artists, including trained chaperones, counsellors, sociable working hours, meal breaks and regular down time."

In the UK, schoolchildren up to the age of 16 are protected by the Child Performance Licensing laws, which legislates that children performing in public or on TV must apply for a licence to perform from their local authority to ensure their "health, welfare and kind treatment" within the entertainment industry. However, this stops once the 16-year-olds are of a school-leaving age, meaning that 16 and 17-year-olds aren't covered by these welfare rules and could easily fall through the cracks, especially if their surrounding team are working to a different agenda – where profit takes priority over the artist's wellbeing. As Ed Magee, chair of the National Network for Children in Employment and Entertainment tells the BBC: "These 16-year-olds who have finished compulsory school and 17-year-olds would not covered by legislation, and so instead the responsibility to look after them would fall on to the production company, their agent and their parents, as they are still a child after all, and they would need their parents' consent.

"We're currently looking at creating a guide for parents about some of the things they need to think about when their child is going into the entertainment industry, [including] the safeguarding, travel abroad, and who is looking after the welfare of their children."

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Spice Girls Founder Reveals His Top 5 Spookiest Moments in Pop Culture

Sat, 26 Oct 2024 11:11:00 +0000

One consistently great joy of Halloween is just how bloody camp it is. Horror films, dancing skeletons, dressing up as pop culture icons or scary creatures from mythology in the hopes of getting treats... it’s heaven, actually.

With that in mind, while we’re tucking into our essential spooky films this season, Chris Herbert, the founder of the Spice Girls and board director of Audoo, the company on a mission to revolutionise how public performance royalties are paid, has revealed his top five spooky pop culture memories.

And what a spine-tingling trip down memory lane it is... Five spookiest moments from pop culture history according to Chris Herbert:

Michael Jackson’s ‘Thriller’ Music Video

Chris said: “Released in 1982, Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” is basically the anthem of the spooky season. With its groundbreaking visuals, iconic dance moves, and that unforgettable Vincent Price voiceover, it’s been scaring (and delighting) us for decades. No Halloween is complete without it! Turning 40 this year, the 13-minute music video has just achieved over a billion views on YouTube this year because audiences are STILL so captivated by Michael Jackson’s zombie dance moves. Whether at costume parties or on the Halloween playlist, “Thriller” remains the ultimate spooky vibe-setter.”

Can you still do the dance? I just checked and I can even do it sitting at my desk.

Lady Gaga’s ‘Meat Dress’ at the 2009 VMA’s

“Don’t get me wrong, I love steak and chips but one of the spookiest pop culture moments has to be when Lady Gaga wore a dress made entirely of meat for the VMA’s. When Gaga walked onto the stage wrapped head-to-toe in raw beef, she instantly stole the entire awards ceremony, sparking discussions about fashion, art, and activism."

“I love Gaga’s ability to push audience boundaries, and it’s certainly a pop culture moment we’ll never forget (for better or for worse) and her boldness has cemented her place on the podium for the scariest pop culture moments of all time.”

She really raised the steaks on this one. I’ll see myself out.

When Mel B dressed up as…Mel B

“Would it be my scary pop culture moment roundup without a mention of the Spice Girls? One of my favourite moments has to be from 2014, when Mel B embraced her former 90s persona and dressed as Scary Spice for Halloween, complete with her signature cheetah print look."

“Today, the Spice Girls are the Halloween costume amongst friend groups but is there anything more iconic than dressing as yourself for Halloween - only Scary Spice could pull this one off!”

I might go as myself with a hangover this Halloween. A truly horrifying sight.

Billie Eilish’s ‘Bury a Friend’ Music Video

“A music video has the potential to make or break a song, and Billie Eilish’s ‘Bury a Friend’ is the perfect example of how dark aesthetics and an eerie atmosphere can totally work. She creates a mini horror film in all of 3 minutes, it’s amazing!"

“The distorted vocals and unsettling visuals are the perfect way to get lost in the spooky season, there’s no way it wasn’t making this list.”

Personally... I wouldn’t mess with Billie after seeing this, tbh.

That giant Taylor Swift Pumpkin

“While her Eras Tour was certainly the talking point of everyone’s summer this year, last Halloween, a giant 100lbs pumpkin painted and shaped like Taylor Swift made headlines for its spooky accuracy to the pop star.

“Jeanette Paras, the artist behind the work, has spent 35 hours “pumpkinising” celebrities and in 2023, Taylor Swift was next in line. Forget the Grammys and the Brit Awards, I’m sure Taylor was honoured to be the muse for this classic Halloween tradition.”

Uh, yeah. We’re sure. A jumpscare indeed.

Happy Halloween season!

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Audoo appoints senior industry figures as board advisors

Wed, 11 Sep 2024 14:53:00 +0000

Audoo has appointed senior music industry executives as board advisors.

Steve Clark, COO of Round Hill Music, Isabel Garvey, COO of Warner Music UK, and Sean O’Malley, CEO & founder of Regard Music, will all support the growth of Audoo. The music recognition technology and data company is working to improve collection of public performance royalties with greater accuracy.

Clark, Garvey and O’Malley join existing Audoo advisors, Cliff Fluet, partner at Lewis Silkin, and former CEO of Syneos Health, Alistair Macdonald. They will provide further specialist guidance and counsel to the company board, which includes fellow music industry executives Chris Herbert and Nigel Elderton.

Steve Clark, COO, Round Hill Music and Audoo board advisor, said: “The depth and understanding of music rights and royalties is at a critical juncture in the history of the music industry. As networks of music rights-holders evolve, we must ensure that systems do too, to meet the ever-changing rhythm and flow of this part of the business. The ethos of the Audoo offering is vitally worthy and the execution of its solutions to meet the growing needs of parties in the data chain has been impressive to observe – I look forward to supporting its progress in improving the landscape of tracking and distribution of royalties.”

Isabel Garvey, COO, Warner Music UK and Audoo board advisor, said: “Having helped select Audoo for the Abbey Road Red programme years ago during its start-up phase, it's gratifying to see its elevated and thriving status now. Audoo’s disruptive technology solution which delivers transparent and efficient royalty tracking and distribution has benefits across the whole value chain in music. I am excited to support Audoo on its growth journey as it transforms the current landscape in this space.”

Sean O’Malley, founder and CEO, Regard Music and Audoo board advisor, said: “The innovation and practicality of Audoo solutions are positively disruptive. These services will aid the refinement of our source data and change the landscape in this sector of our industry. Working with fellow musician and music fan Ryan, and his team, this worthy mission originates from the heart and I’m proud to advise and aid its next-level success.”

Ryan Edwards, founder and CEO of Audoo, added: “The combined experience of Steve, Isabel and Sean brings a powerful wealth of knowledge across labels, publishers, rights-holders and creators - to have such revered executives join our existing world-class group of Board members and Advisors demonstrates the strength of belief in the business as we continue to build and refine the Audoo offering.”

Earlier in 2024, Audoo announced a partnership with PMY Group to integrate the Audoo Audio Meter into tech stacks at major events, enhancing public performance reporting in these settings.

The growing tech company also announced its partnership with the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) to amplify public performance royalty distributions in Ireland.

Venues can request an Audio Meter for their premises from Audoo, free of charge.

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