Towards Fairer Royalties: The Rise of Background Music Monitoring

For decades, the way performing rights organisations (PROs) have distributed royalties from background music — the kind played in shops, cafés, gyms, hotels and restaurants — has largely depended on estimates, market research, or proxy data rather than direct measurement. That approach was born out of necessity: it was simply not feasible to track every song played in every venue.

But as technology evolves, so does the potential to make royalty distributions fairer and more accurate — based on what’s actually being played, in real time.

Why it matters

Background music represents a significant source of revenue for music rights holders. Yet historically, this revenue hasn’t been distributed in a way that reflects true usage. This often leads to:

- Overrepresentation of popular, mainstream tracks.
- Underpayment to niche genres, emerging artists, or local repertoire.
- A lack of transparency in how performance data is collected and processed.

By capturing real-world data directly from venues, PROs can better reflect actual music use, benefiting a broader range of creators.

Audoo’s approach

One of the most visible companies in this emerging field is Audoo, a UK-based music recognition company focused specifically on monitoring background music in public venues.

Audoo has developed a dedicated device — the Audoo Audio Meter — which is installed in venues such as shops, bars and restaurants. These devices continuously and passively recognise music being played using audio fingerprinting technology. Importantly, the system is designed with privacy in mind, capturing only music (not speech) and processing data securely in line with GDPR.

Audoo partners with PROs around the world, providing them with high-resolution data to improve the accuracy of royalty distributions. Their goal is not only technological, but also ethical: to ensure that all artists, regardless of popularity, are fairly compensated when their music is played in public spaces.

BMAT’s role in the background

Another key player in the music data space is BMAT Music Innovators, a Barcelona-based company known for its audio fingerprinting and monitoring services. While BMAT is best known for tracking music usage in broadcast and live performance environments (such as radio, television, clubs and festivals), they also support background music monitoring indirectly.

Rather than deploying their own hardware, BMAT works with collective management organisations to process data provided by background music service providers or third-party monitoring systems. In some cases, this includes data from venues where background music is used, though it is not their primary business focus.

In that sense, BMAT plays a complementary role in the ecosystem — enabling PROs to make better-informed decisions about distributions, even if they are not directly gathering background music data at the point of use.

A step towards transparency

The move toward real-time monitoring of background music is part of a broader industry shift toward greater transparency and accountability. Whether through hardware deployments like Audoo’s, or through data processing platforms like BMAT’s, the goal is the same: to ensure that every creator gets paid when their music is played — not just those at the top of the charts.