Grassroots Music Venues Take Centre Stage in New Music Venue Trust and Audoo Partnership

New Initiative Aims to Test Whether Current Royalty Distribution Models Accurately Reflect the Music Performed in Grassroots Music Venues

Music Venue Trust (MVT) and Audoo have announced a new partnership aimed at uncovering how music played in grassroots music venues is represented within public performance royalty distributions 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 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. 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 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 favours 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 licence fees those venues are required to pay.

Audoo’s Audio Meter™ is a compact, plug-and-play device that captures music in real time across venue environments. Privacy-safe and simple to deploy, it requires minimal involvement from venue owners and delivers accurate, real-world usage data at scale. The data gathered through the initiative is intended to support wider industry discussions around transparency, accountability and modernisation 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.

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.”

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.