Photo Credit: Music Venue Trust x Audoo
Music Venue Trust and Audoo announce a partnership aimed at uncovering how music played in grassroots venues is represented in royalty distribution.
On Tuesday, the Music Venue Trust (MVT) and Audoo announced a new partnership aimed at uncovering how music played in grassroots music venues is represented within performance royalty distribution administered by PRS for Music and related licensing systems.
As part of the collaboration, Audoo’s proprietary “Audio Meter” technology will be deployed across “a statistically significant selection” of 12 grassroots music venues across the UK to capture exactly what music is being played in real time in a representative sample of the sector.
The initiative will gather real-world music usage data in order to assess whether current royalty distribution methodologies accurately reflect the music actually being played within grassroots music venues.
The partnership is rooted in a growing concern across the independent music sector that public performance royalties collected from venues are not being distributed based on accurate data. Instead, royalty allocations have historically relied on proxy datasets, including radio airplay, national broadcast usage, manual surveys, and streaming patterns, which may bear little resemblance to what is actually being played.
Audoo and MVT believe this approach results in a system that disproportionately favors a mainstream repertoire and fails to capture the unique programming environment of grassroots venues, while independent, emerging, and self-released artists who define grassroots culture miss out. These are artists whose music often does not feature prominently across traditional reporting datasets, meaning those genuinely shaping the rooms and attracting audiences may not receive an equitable share of the royalties generated by the very license fees those venues are required to pay.
Privacy-safe and simple to deploy, Audoo’s Audio Meter is plug-and-play and requires minimal involvement from venue owners to deliver accurate, real-world usage data at scale. The data gathered through the initiative is intended to support wider industry discussions about transparency, accountability, and modernization within public performance licensing.
Both MVT and Audoo stress that the goal is not to undermine licensing systems, but to help ensure that royalties are distributed as accurately and fairly as possible using real-world music usage data.
“Grassroots music venues pay significant license fees every year, and venue operators rightly expect that money to flow back to the artists and songwriters whose music they actually champion. The concern for many years has been that existing methodologies do not adequately reflect what is happening culturally within grassroots spaces. This partnership with Audoo allows us to contribute meaningful data and evidence to that conversation.”
“For too long, public performance royalty distributions have relied on inaccurate proxy data sources that do not fully represent the diversity of music being played at venues across the UK—something we have successfully helped to evolve around the world,” added Ryan Edwards, Founder and CEO of Audoo. “Audoo was created to revolutionize an outdated system and provide a scalable and accurate solution, and by partnering with Music Venue Trust, we have an opportunity to demonstrate how data can help create a fairer and more transparent ecosystem for venues, artists, and songwriters alike.”
The initiative forms part of a wider industry conversation around the future of music licensing and royalty distribution, particularly within independent and grassroots sectors where cultural impact often moves faster than traditional reporting systems.