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Tunecore co-founders raise new funding for YouTube revenue service Audiam

By | Published on Wednesday 5 March 2014

Audiam

YouTube revenue service Audiam, which was launched by Tunecore co-founders Jeff Price and Peter Wells last summer, has raised $2 million in investment from a number of funders.

As previously reported, the service aims to ensure that independent musicians are properly credited and remunerated for their publishing royalties on YouTube videos. To date, the service represents over 100,000 songs from publishing firms such as Imagem, House Of Hassle and the personal companies of artists such as Dolly Parton, The Dandy Warhols and Tori Amos.

The new funding, which in part comes from Jason Mraz, Jimmy Buffett, and Epitaph Records founder Brett Gurewitz, will be used to expand the service and improve its technology.

Gurewitz, who also benefits from the service as frontman and songwriter in punk band Bad Religion, said of the set up: “Audiam’s got a value proposition where everyone wins: the user at home posting videos, the songwriter, the recording artist, the fan, YouTube, everyone. Their combination of copyright knowledge and tech capability puts them in a class of their own. It’s why we use them and why I invested in them”.

Audiam CEO Jeff Price added: “YouTube is a sponge, which if squeezed correctly, rains money. The challenge is to create a cutting-edge, first-of-its-kind technology system built for the new digital music industry that can be applied to the analogue world of antiquated, complex and confusing copyright. With these systems in place, the right people and copyright holders get paid more money more quickly, with as much transparency and efficiency as possible. We work to serve the artist, songwriter, musician, label and copyright holder and get them paid in the new digital model. This is what we do, and we do it better than anyone else in the world”.

Although YouTube’s royalty payments to music makers have been criticised by some in recent months (particularly at MIDEM last month, where Google’s Vice President of YouTube Content Tom Pickett found himself heckled), many labels are now enjoying sizable income from the video platform, even if per-play payments are very low. Though independent music publishers who are also due royalties (even though they don’t usually directly upload content to the Google platform) have often found navigating the video service’s ContentID and royalty systems confusing and unhelpful, and it’s those rights owners Audiam aims to assist.



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