Fixing Music Royalties: Ryan Edwards, CEO of Audoo, on Data, Hardware and Building the Industry Standard

What happens when you hear your own hit song playing in public, but never receive the royalty?In this episode of Riding Unicorns, James sits down with Ryan Edwards, Founder & CEO of Audoo, the music technology company rebuilding how public performance royalties are measured and distributed.The idea for Audoo came from Ryan’s own experience as a musician. After hearing one of his songs playing in a London department store and discovering there was effectively no reliable way to track the royalty, he started investigating how the system actually worked.What he found was an industry still relying heavily on proxy data, manual surveys and people physically visiting venues with clipboards.Audoo’s answer is the Audio Meter, a small connected device that identifies music being played in public venues without recording or storing conversations. The resulting data allows collecting societies to understand what was actually played and distribute royalties more accurately to artists and rights holders.Today, Audoo operates across 16 countries, with its technology deployed in environments ranging from cafés and retailers to gyms and leisure centres.Ryan shares how he built the first prototype on a Raspberry Pi at his kitchen table, validated the idea with the former Chairman of PRS for Music, and launched the first real-world deployment on the other side of the world in Australia during COVID.We also discuss the unusual group of investors Audoo has attracted along the way, including Björn Ulvaeus of ABBA, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Adam Clayton of U2 and Adele, and how those relationships have helped build credibility and open doors across the music industry.Topics Covered• Why the public performance royalty system needed rebuilding• The personal experience that led Ryan to start Audoo• Building the first Audio Meter prototype on a Raspberry Pi• Why privacy had to be designed into the technology from day one• The challenges of combining software, data and physical hardware• Landing Audoo’s first major deployment in Australia during COVID• Why venues are willing to install Audio Meters• How better music recognition data changes royalty distributions• Raising capital from some of the biggest names in music• Expanding Audoo across 16 countries and into the Middle East• What Ryan has learned from eight years as a founder• Why founders need to celebrate wins and know when something can wait until MondayThis is a conversation about spotting an antiquated system, using technology to rebuild it from first principles, and creating the data infrastructure that could finally ensure artists are paid accurately when their music is played.