Music Venue Trust & Audoo Partner to Analyze UK Grassroots Performance Royalty Distribution

Performance royalty distribution is an ongoing issue in live music, because it’s still done inefficiently to a large extent. The proof: the sheer amount of tech start ups out there aiming to solve the often archaic ways in which setlists performed inside venues are being recorded for the subsequent distribution of performance royalties by the performance rights organizations.

Audoo is one of them, by its own admission “a multi-award-winning technology company revolutionizing performance royalty reporting through accurate data.”

The company’s so-called Audoo Audio Meter recognizes the music played across public performance locations, promising “levels of accuracy that haven’t been seen before.”

The company has now partnered with the UK’s Music Venue Trust (MVT) in order to uncover how music played in grassroots music venues is represented within public performance royalty distributions administered by PRS for Music, the UK’s performing rights society, and related licensing systems.

As part of the collaboration, Audoo’s Audio Meter technology will be deployed across “a statistically significant selection of 120 grassroots music venues throughout the UK, capturing exactly what music is being played in real time in a representative sample of the whole sector,” according to the press release announcing the partnerhsip.

The initiative will thereby 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 often bear little resemblance to what is actually being played on the ground.

According to Audoo and MVT, 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.

“The data gathered through the initiative is intended to support wider industry discussions around transparency, accountability and modernization within public performance licensing,” the press announcement states, with both MVT and Audoo stressing “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.

“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.”

Comments:

Mark Davyd, Founder and CEO of Music Venue Trust: “Grassroots music venues pay significant licence 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 reporting 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.”

Ryan Edwards, Founder and CEO of Audoo: “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 in venues across the UK – something we have successfully helped to evolve around the world. Audoo was created to revolutionise 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.”

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_Originally reported by [Pollstar](https://news.pollstar.com/2026/06/11/music-venue-trust-audoo-to-assess-performance-royalty-distribution-in-uk-grassroots-sector/)._