Ryan Edwards: Founder and CEO of Audoo

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1:14The End

1:24Till vs. Romero.

1:25Elliot Moss:Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Welcome to the Jazz Shapers podcast from Mishkondorea. What you're about to hear was originally broadcast on Jazz FM. However, the music has been cut due to rights issues.

1:43Elliot Moss:This is Jazz Shapers with Elliot Moss on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkondorea. It's business, but it's personal.

1:56Elliot Moss:listening color welcome to jazz shapers with me elliot moss bringing the shapers of the business world together with a musician shaping jazz soul and blues my guest today is ryan edwards founder and ceo of or do a music technology company tracking the music played in public spaces so artists and songwriters are paid fairly after a successful career as a drummer in indie rock band the lines scoring a top 10 hit and opening for rem and the killers amongst others ryan's band was dropped suddenly after coming off stage to 80 ,000 people. Ryan turned to retail, eventually running stores and his own entrepreneurial ventures, then switching into roles at Visa, Bink and Grapple Mobile.

2:31Elliot Moss:But it was in 2018, having heard his band song Domino Effect, playing in a department store and wondering whether they'd be paid the royalties they were due, that Ryan discovered how little data there was about the distribution of royalties and how unfair the system could be. ordu was founded in 2019 and backed by music royalty wait for it drum roll paul mccartney bion olvaez from abba and elton john none other than him orders audio meter plugs into venues like cafes gyms shops and bars recognizing the songs played and sending data automatically to performance rights organizations musicians can get the money they're rightly owed and a more accurate breakdown of their reach as well it's great to have you here uh thank you for joining.

3:12Elliot Moss:You are a musician first and foremost. Is that how you describe yourself still? Or is that gone now, Ryan? I think probably semi-retired musician, maybe a bedroom musician. But yeah, wish I'd probably kept it up more. But as life gets busy and you have children and a family, it definitely takes a backseat. I mean, 80 ,000 people, the buzz of being a very young, how old were you at the time? I'd have been early 20s. Early 20s. I mean, my oldest is 21, he's in fact a drummer like you, but he's at university studying music at Southampton University but you went you went for it yeah and ironically that my plan was to to go and study jazz drumming at Leeds College of Music so I'd got in I'd done my A-levels and then we signed a record deal so um I guess I got probably a different level of experience because we got to be me we got to tour we got to play to huge crowds meet our heroes and all that um yeah and there's always that kind of I guess question in my head of what if what if I'd have actually gone and made it to Leeds College of Music, what would have happened?

4:10Would I have gone so far deep down in jazz rather than kind of the Indian rock and roll route that I ended up going?

4:15Elliot Moss:But also, would you have ended up here talking to me now about a business you set up? Who knows? Maybe not. It's life a mystery. But that, back into when you were 19, 20, 21, and it's happening, and then suddenly you dropped. What does that do to you as a young person? I mean, pretty soul destroying. As you say, we were in Europe, I think we were in Austria, yeah played that massive gig and it was like that's it it's done it's over uh and i always i say you know i think we left on the uh thursday evening i moped around on the friday and you know by the monday i was like i've got to go and get a job now this is this is it right you didn't you didn't go to uni you didn't go and take the the preferred educational route or um kind of musical training route that i thought i was going to go and um and yeah and i think it was a good reality shock i think um from a good working class background so it was like okay head down now go and work and figure this out.

5:07Elliot Moss:Amazingly robust response though for a young person. Yeah. Do you look back and go, that was lucky, thank God I didn't, you know, capitulate because a lot of people would have spent not a day or two days moping, they probably would have spent a good few months or even longer or we would never have this conversation because they never actually went and did something in this way. It's true. I think a lot of it comes back to parents. I think my, I don't think my mum or dad would have let me mope around for too long. They'd have said, come on, you've got bills to pay, we're not going to keep you, you know, you need to, you need to go and get on with it and I think I've always been quite driven I always knew there was a world out there and I guess I'd had a flavor of that world for the music and being able to you know to tour and see bits so I think for me it was actually I want to go out I want to experience more and I want to be part of it again so it was kind of yeah head down get on working go down some money and try and grow a career as well did meet a girl as well so it was uh and is the girl is the girl still with you she is she's now yeah 20 years later my wife so um yeah so yeah Ryan, you've done well.

6:01Elliot Moss:Well, the band may not have happened, but you've got a much more important prize. And just in your own words, Ordu, I mean, we know people have heard of you and heard of the story. You heard the thing, you heard the music one. I wonder if they're going to capture this for me. Just how do you describe Ordu to people that haven't got a clue what it is? Cool. So we describe ourselves as a technology and a data business and we're serving the music industry. So everybody will know recognition engines, you probably would have used Shazam on a phone or seen smart speakers. so we're almost the next generation of that but we're industrialised so we're at a huge scale and we're in anywhere from pubs and clubs to retail outlets we're in as far afield as schools and nurseries as well because of course they play and broadcast music in those environments as well and we're capturing and we're logging all the data beyond that music so it can then be used for royalty distributions and insights across the industry as well.

6:54Elliot Moss:You know your arrival at that point and we've started very quickly in sort of, you know, 20 years, 2005. And we've skirted over sort of 15 years almost of working. In that working period, you went out and got a job, good working class values and all that. Did you ever have aspirations to really run your own thing? Were you quite happy doing what you were doing? No, honestly, I was pretty happy. So yeah, I kind of had that professional career and was growing it, you know, year on year, bit by bit. And yeah, there was never a moment of I want to be a founder, I want to be a CEO. I think it was this idea came, you know, it happened.

7:32It was that moment in the department store hearing my own music and then actually a few weeks later receiving my statement and going, oh, okay, I don't understand the correlation or there is no correlation. And kind of just almost, I call it Google bashing, just sat there probably one Sunday evening going, how does it work? What's going on? And what I found was articles and forums and things by lawyers written saying the whole system was really antiquated. You know, it was being done manually. There wasn't a lot of data in there. There was a lot of inaccuracies in there. Like even down to cover versions, you know, if somebody's out there doing a manual survey, they might write down yesterday by the Beatles, but it could have been a cover.

8:10So of course, Lennon and McCartney need to be paid for the composition, but then the recording artists on the other side needs to be paid. So there was a lot of things like that. And actually, I was in a fintech business, which we're in the process of taking a large investment, and I decided it was my time after a few years there to move on and it was investment from a big bank and I was like, oh, I could end up wearing a suit here. And I was not too sure about that. Don't think you want to do that, right? And I'd got another job with a huge fitness brand that was really, really growing aggressively and had this idea during the period and actually reached out to the chairman of PRS for Music here in the UK because I'd built a prototype at my kitchen table.

8:50And PRS for people that don't know? Oh, yeah, so it's the Performing Rights Society. and they collect all these license fees and they're the people who actually pay the artists. And the intention of that meeting was genuinely to give him the tech, to say, hey, I just built this. I think this would be really useful for you. So you had built something by that? Yeah, so at this point, I just, almost at my kitchen table, just kind of just built a very, very basic prototype just to show that I could recognize, do a small castle log and report it in a really succinct way. Just out of interest, what did that look like, that thing you built?

9:19So there were a couple of sides to it. So I'd built kind of a web portal. So you think about going onto any website and where you could see the songs coming in. So artist title, runtime, and got some metadata tags in there, which are kind of gone and found on the internet. And then the other second bit is what's known as a Raspberry Pi in the development world. So a Raspberry Pi kind of looks like a really over-technical small computer. So it's about the size of a phone, a little bit thicker. And it's kind of like a blank chipboard that you can write code onto. And it's a way a lot of developers will practice and write their code onto.

9:52so then you can test and learn with it. And then, of course, then that's how you go and scale. So when I think back, and of course, I've still got it in my home office, you know, that little Raspberry Pi device was the life-changing moment because, of course, I went to PRS and said, hey, I'm going to give you this. I just think this could be really useful. And you guys, you know, you're a huge organization. Off you go. And it was the chairman in that moment who said, Ryan, he said, like, you need to build this for us and you need to build it because it's not just a UK problem. It's a global problem.

10:20so actually if you can do it and you can scale a business off this you'll be onto a winning streak.

10:26Elliot Moss:But even just listening to you talk about it and Raspberry Pi I'm very familiar, I met the founder many many years ago as well the audacity of you trying to put this together and the belief that you could I mean did you know how big the problem was? I guess that's my thing because if it's that big sometimes people just go that falls in the bucket of just too complicated but it didn't for you. Well I think it was because like every business I just took very small steps each stage and actually looking back six years ago now definitely didn't know the size of the problem and didn't know some of the challenges that we come up against as we uh as we tried to scale particularly music industry lawyers they're an interesting bunch but um you know like kind of having to work and you've got one on your board so yeah exactly he's brilliant he's he's my common sense lawyer but um but actually just i think because we saw it as so small so insular and just went okay let's take it to the next level let's build and actually i'd I'd shown some friends who were also in tech.

11:20I'd been in a business that had raised investments. I went to a couple of the people who had invested in that and kind of said, look, almost this is what I found. I wasn't even going in pitching saying, hey, can I have some money? Can I do this? I'm going to build a business. It was very, very organic. And every person that I spoke to, outside the initial reaction that went, that can't be right. It's got to be more advanced than that. It's got to be cleverer. And then you'd say to them, well, I'd say to them, just go and Google Bash, right? tell me what you come and actually what every single person then would come back and go oh my life yeah you were absolutely right i was like of course i was always right but you know really you know really validating and everybody that i was talking to was coming up with the same conclusion and then even going to like people like cliff who's on our board you know brilliant music rights lawyer and and approaching him again on linkedin and saying hey i just want to talk to you about this further validation saying yes this has plagued my entire career and it's you know it's why I've wrapped the board around me that we have, because we've got music managers, we've got the ex-chairman of PRS, we've got Cliff as a lawyer, people who are running song funds, who've all just come in and said, this is a problem, we've got to help you shape this and kind of grow the business.

12:27Elliot Moss:Stay with me for much more from my guest. It's Ryan Edwards. He'll be back in a couple of minutes. Right now, we're going to hear a taste of from the Mishcon Academy digital sessions, which you can find on all the major podcast platforms. In this clip, Joe Hancock, partner in cyber risk and complex investigations at Mishcon Der Air, is joined by Emmerich Bernard-Jones, intelligence manager in the same team. and they are discussing cybercrime and how to be safe online. The Mishkan Academy Digital Sessions. Conversations on the legal topics affecting businesses and individuals today. What would your advice be to someone who is like, I've got a social media profile, I like it, I use it, it's part of my brand.

13:02Elliot Moss:What sort of things should they be thinking about to keep themselves safe when using it? In terms of general rules, at least ones that I use for myself, I would never post a photograph or a video or a reel or a story or a TikTok or anything live at a location. If you're out for dinner, there's no real reason that you have to post it then and there. You can wait four hours after leaving or you can wait till the next day. It's still going to have the same impact, but it's just going to kind of lower the safety risk that is brought out when you're showcasing where you are all the time. I would also say never put anything that is an asset online or in a public forum where a bunch of people can see.

13:50You might be really, really proud of your new watch, but unless your job is watch collector or watch salesman, you don't really need to put that up there because A, it's going to make you potentially a target, but B, people can see how much that watch costs and then target you for all types of different stuff. You suddenly become a much more appealing target for, I don't know, a love bombing campaign if you're posting seven different Rolexes. So I would just avoid all of the kind of trappings of a glamorous lifestyle. It might be really, really interesting to flex it, but unless you're gaining something from doing that, you just leave it in the drafts.

14:33Elliot Moss:The Mishkan Academy Digital Sessions. To access advice for businesses that is regularly updated, please visit mishkan.com. Jazz Shapers on Jazz FM. In partnership with Mishkan Derea. It's business, but it's personal. You can enjoy all our former Business Shapers on the Jazz Shapers podcast and you can hear this very program again if you pop Jazz Shapers into your podcast platform of choice. My guest there is Ryan Edwards, in case you hadn't noticed, founder and CEO of Ordu, a music technology company, tracking the music played in public spaces so artists and songwriters are paid fairly. The fairly words are really interesting because, of course, you weren't, you and your pursuit of this were just going, this isn't right.

15:13Elliot Moss:There's music being played and people aren't being recompensed for it. There's just a bit of a kit. So you move on and you start building stuff. Who's the first person that sort of buys this? I know you've got some funding, obviously, but who were the very first people who said, all right we'll install this we'll see what happens so this is where um life gets really complex because of the pandemic so um i'd taken on the funding we'd built the first version and we were due to launch our first pilot self-funded pilot in the uk in april of 2020 just as the entire world great timing yeah well done so i know so i had to go out to those those investors shareholders and say it's gonna take a little bit longer then of course they all came back and went look, A, nobody launches on time, B, because the world shut down, it's a fairly good excuse.

15:59And I was quite happy to go and go, look, but we were ready. We were genuinely ready. So we then replanted our launch for the November of 20, which is Q lockdown two in the UK. My 50th birthday, which never happened.

16:13Elliot Moss:Well, it did happen, but we didn't say it right, to be clear. On fire Zoom. Yeah, well, it was almost that. It was cups of tea outside the house at a distance. My daughter's first birthday was three days after the first lockdown. So I think it took her to three years old to have a birthday where she could see people other than my wife and I or family via Zoom. It's all in the rearview mirror though, isn't it? Yeah. We're not tired by this. No, we're not at all. We haven't been traumatized, any of us. It's fine. No, but yeah, we're still using it. But after the second lockdown happened in the November, I thought, okay, I've got to really show my shareholders that we've done something and the team was really driven and we were kind of waiting.

16:50So good old LinkedIn, went back to LinkedIn again and reached out to the Australian Rights Organization, which is known as APRA, which stands for the Australian Performing Rights Association. Introduced who we are, what we're doing, and said, look, we'd love for you to be the first in the world. And they came back and went, absolutely, brilliant. Which then gave us a whole different challenge because, of course, it's a hardware product. So if you're software, you just deploy it over the air. But hardware, we're like, hmm, how do we do this? So the research moved to, okay, who's going to know the environments that we're going to go into we need to know somebody who's going to understand retail, hospitality, fitness and we found a CCTV business that operated in Sydney and connected with them and said could we use some of your installers to just go out and plug it in Is that what it is?

17:36Elliot Moss:It's a plug in it's a speaker in reverse Exactly, it's a very small device I can show you one, I've got one in my bag so I'll show you one, maybe we'll hold it up So high tech Exactly but we went out and we said can you just help can you do this and of course we paid them and they went out and why did you choose them out of interest uh so we we just we really liked them as a business how they were like their their kind of values from just their website seemed to match us we had a few calls often in the middle of the night because we were trying to sell to them so can you help us um and they were just brilliant they were an absolutely brilliant business they didn't think you were mad right oh completely and i think actually that's what it appeared Even back to, I actually didn't tell the shareholders before we did this, because I was like, okay, because if this fails, I've got to keep it quiet.

18:21We've got to figure out a different way to do this. But I think they saw a bit of madness, but maybe a bit of brilliance, because the team that employ are amazing. So I think they saw that opportunity. I think Australians, they're great to do business with, because actually they love innovation. There's always a British connection to Australia anyway. and I think they were just really up for trying and doing something different and showing some progress.

18:47Elliot Moss:And you install it, and how quickly is it capturing what you need to see? So we sent all of our units out. We said to the CCTV business, could you do us a favor, can you plug them in in the office just to make sure? Because again, we've never even been able to test this out of the UK. And we don't use Wi-Fi. We use an eSIM, which is a SIM card built onto the board, because we didn't want to go into a venue and say, what's your password? How do we log on? all that we didn't want to disturb them we just wanted to plug it in and leave them alone and of course the shipment arrived they plugged them in and every single one connected so kudos to our cto and our tech team for what they did there because that was amazing and then you're up and running about three days later they went out and it's it's funny because the the australian society of course we've got to know really well over the last few years in in in my world there's um there's a a gym and aquatic center just on the outskirts of sydney called the lane cove aquatic center and That's the first place that we plugged in.

19:41And of course, when I then was able to go out post kind of lockdowns and having to sit in a hotel room for two weeks, it was one of the first things I said to our local team. I said, I've got to go there. They're going, you're weird. This is really weird. I was going, I just need to go. I need to see it. I need to take a photo. I need to take a selfie. I just need, it's such an important pivotal moment in my life that means nothing to anybody else. And I've told the story a million times, but actually it was, it works. It still works. that original one is still in there, you know, a few years later, and it's reporting and people are getting paid because of it.

20:13So it does show sometimes just pushing and trying and taking those steps, you know, it definitely pays off.

20:20Elliot Moss:And being weird. Ryan Edwards, my weird business shape, they're rather successful as well. He's the founder and CEO of Ordu, and he had the audacity to take this to Australia, and it's all working out rather well. Ducking and diving, inventively making it up as you go along, by the sounds of it, in a fabulous way. You seem to be a person who wears his stress very lightly. If you have any stress, you sort of, I mean, do you get stressed? You don't look like you do. Yeah, I think I internalize it quite well because I think you have to, particularly when you're running a business day to day. And also I've wrapped a brilliant team around me who I think we've built those values and we've built that culture within us to actually support each other.

20:58And when somebody's having that tough time or the bad day, you just go give them room to breathe and support them through it.

21:03Elliot Moss:so yeah you've built something obviously this is five years ago we're talking about the the moment in november now we're almost five years forward it's going gangbusters you you're scaling america is the next frontier um how do you retain that sense of what you stand for that sense of tightness what does your team look like these days how do you deal with issues in the team so i think there's um there's a there's a few things i always say my my first employee jess who runs our marketing still with me um she's she's our culture queen so um you know she's the one that is really upbeat really positive and you know the second somebody joins the business it doesn't matter what department they're in she wants to meet them straight away whether they're on the opposite side of the world here she's straight on a zoom straight into them getting them to go for a coffee and just really getting to understand them as a person so we've got you know team members like jess who have really helped shape our culture and make sure particularly if i'm traveling i've got to go off somewhere that she can be here, kind of keep the atmosphere and keep the drive going as well.

22:01Elliot Moss:How would you define the atmosphere or the vibe? I think super positive, super happy most of the time, I'm sure. Not every day, but actually where the team really challenge and really hold each other to account as well. So if somebody's fallen behind on something, it's like actually why have they fallen behind? How can we help them? How can we kind of all roll our sleeves up and get in on it as well? so yeah. And juxtaposing that with I mentioned the celebrity investors obviously very famous big names in the music industry what does that do internally as well it must be quite exciting that Sir Paul McCartney or Sir Elton John or Bjorn from ABRA I mean that's those are about the biggest names in the music industry.

22:39Completely so yeah I think it's for us you know we still see ourselves as this little tech business it's like little project that we're doing and we're working on but it's validation it's for them to go out and explain you know I guess to their families and their friends of, hey, look at what we're doing here. I always joke, since the band and retail, most of my career was digital and data and technology. And I still don't think my parents really knew what I do. Do you think they know now? No, I think they're getting it now. So when I was at Visa, I headed up data and we were doing a lot of data insight with airlines and retailers.

23:15I remember my dad, he'd been in an M &S store once and he'd seen a Visa logo at the till and he said, oh, was that your team son and i just yeah because it was just easier to try yeah there's a few hundred thousand people exactly yeah that was my yeah just go with it just because it was just easier but i think having that and kind of going you know again back to parents or back to you know even the team's families started a business okay cool i've raised some investment okay cool by the way bjorn from abba just got in touch what you know all of a sudden it's like okay what does that mean like You're not talking to him though, right?