Sabam partners with Audoo to replace legacy DJ reporting system in Belgium

Belgium’s authors’ society Sabam has partnered with London-based music technology firm Audoo to replace its existing DJ reporting system with continuous audio recognition. The agreement moves Sabam away from sample-based and manual reporting toward Audoo’s Audio Meter hardware, which identifies music played across venues in real time.

The shift matters for writers and producers whose tracks are played in Belgian clubs and DJ-led environments. Sample-based reporting, still the default at many collecting societies, captures only a fraction of what is actually played across a season of DJ sets, and leans heavily on a smaller pool of better-known names when royalties are distributed. Continuous recognition is designed to close the gap between what is played and what is paid out.

Audoo’s Audio Meters are compact, plug-and-play units designed for live environments, including multi-room venues where several DJs may be performing simultaneously. Each unit captures audio in its immediate zone, which means a club running three or four rooms can generate a set-by-set picture rather than a single data point for the whole venue. The company says the technology has already been deployed across several Belgian sites and has been tested in multi-stage setups.

For Sabam, the move is part of a wider push toward more accurate usage data and faster distributions to its members. Inneke Plasschaert, Deputy Head of Music at Sabam, said the partnership reflects an intent to improve transparency for members and to distribute royalties on the basis of what is actually being played. Ryan Edwards, founder and CEO of Audoo, framed the deal as a step away from legacy reporting and toward real-time measurement.

Audoo was founded in 2018 by Edwards, a former musician and FinTech executive. The company’s hardware is currently installed across fifteen countries on four continents, and it works with collecting societies and performance rights organisations in multiple markets. Sabam represents Belgian authors, composers and publishers across music, film and television, theatre and dance, visual arts, and literature, and covers foreign repertoire played in Belgium through reciprocal agreements with other societies.

The underlying question for the wider industry is whether other societies will follow Sabam’s lead. DJ reporting has long been one of the weakest points in the royalty chain for electronic music specifically, where track identification is complicated by edits, unreleased material, promo dubs, and bootleg remixes. Technology that can identify music at the point of play does not solve all of those issues, particularly for unreleased or unregistered tracks, but it narrows the distance between the DJ booth and the royalty statement. For the underground end of the spectrum, where tracks are played heavily but often go unreported by traditional methods, that distance is where most of the lost income sits.

by Decoded Magazine

• Share
• Tweet
• Pin it
• Share
• Email
• More