Fixing Music Royalties: Ryan Edwards, CEO of Audoo, on Data, Hardware and Building the Industry Standard

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0:35Seapoint Treasury is a money market fund. Rate recorded at 1st of October 2026. Rates are variable and subject to change. Capital at risk. Hello and welcome to another episode of Riding Unicorns. Today's episode is with Ryan Edwards, founder and CEO of Ordu. Ordu is a multi-award winning music technology company revolutionising public performance royalty reporting through improved music recognition data. so welcome to the show Brian it's great to have you on that probably doesn't do it full justice so maybe I could just start by getting you to explain exactly what Ordu does and why it's such an important data business.

1:11So we started as a music recognition company so everybody will have heard of Shazam and different technologies like that and the crude inception of Ordu was an industrial size Shazam you know it was it was to go out and recognize audio in in essentially any setting and this this was born out of a problem in my early 20s i signed a record deal i was a drummer in a band we had a top 10 hit single in the uk and basically for the last 20 years i've been you know around the country around the world and i've heard my music played in lots of different settings and that rawty flow hasn't come through to me and it really came to a head about eight years ago i was in one of the department stores on oxford street with my wife and we heard my song And, you know, we kind of jokingly went, oh, haven't heard this for a while.

1:58And then realized it was me. And then of course, she's like, oh, how would you be paid for this today? And she was looking at a very expensive handbag. And I was like, it certainly is not going to pay for that. And of course, I tracked that royalty or tried to track it, having spent most of my professional career in kind of digital and data technology companies. And that payment never came through, even though it would have probably been a fraction of a penny. And it got me thinking about how do the rights organizations that pay those royalties, how do they know that I was played in that environment essentially and what I found was a really really antiquated old school system so you've got rights organizations that are 100 plus years old because they were created originally by orchestras and they used to pull all their money together and of course they've evolved and they've grown into different things being it collected digital rights or broadcast rights and for public performance so this is anywhere that you hear music when you're out and about so that's from your gym to your retail it's your cafe even schools and churches you know when music is performed in public be it live music in person performance or a pre-recorded you know a cd a jukebox a stream being played in there the way that they were doing it was proxy data sets so they were looking at radio they were looking at broadcast and go chart data what do we think is popular let's weight it like this and then they were doing a manual process as well so somebody would literally go into a cafe into a retail unit with a clipboard and stand there for a couple of hours and kind of scribble down probably using Shazam or you know or having some level of knowledge and scribbling it down and I kind of just looked at it and went there has to be a better more digital more automated approach and yeah that set me off eight years ago and here we are 16 countries around the world lots of money raised investment from our heroes and still going so yeah awesome and obviously incredibly interesting personal story there about why that came about but what did you do to validate that this was sort of actually a bigger problem and it was affecting many people through the industry the first thing was went to some friends and actually friends who weren't in music so friends in tech and almost went and said guys look i've kind of got this idea and i think this is a problem and this is what i've seen would you all spare a couple of hours to do a bit of research for me can you do some google bashing you know next sunday evening and just tell me and i'd always laugh because the first two friends that i went to we actually discussed it over dinner and i woke up then the next morning with 50 whatsapps from one of them going oh my god this is a massive problem you have to do this how much can i invest how can we do this and i was going whoa like i wasn't asking you for money or anything i was just asking you to validate it and then of course the other one then got really excited about it and before you knew it it had really spiraled they'd validated everything and then from there I really for fun kind of went okay well let me just see what I can build let me do something and I built a prototype at my kitchen table and I was in a job at the side I was fully employed and I wrote to the chairman of PRS for music which is the you know the UK's the largest one and it was a very much a LinkedIn you know message that said hey you don't know me I wondered if I could buy you a coffee I've got something that could really help and And even at that moment, going into that coffee with him was almost it was a bit of a good Samaritan.

5:18I was kind of going to give it him and say, look, you know, you guys collect hundreds of millions of pounds. You must have huge tech teams. Why don't you build upon this? Why don't you do something with it? And I always say that 20 minute meeting, which became two hours, was the real pivotal moment because he completely validated it. He said to me, everybody's going to need this. and said, you know, let me connect you with the team because they're going to really, really want to hear from you and really want to see this. And that was it. So it happened all in a relatively short period, probably sub three months from idea, dinner with friends, initial validation, even getting my wife to do some Googling.

5:55She's an accountant as well. So saying to her just, you know, what do you think? Let's reverse engineer some of their end of year accounts, et cetera. Let's see what we, we think that looks like and bring it all together. And we haven't look back and I guess the real full circle moment is Nigel who was the chairman of PRS at that moment so this would have been seven years ago they have terms maximum terms that they can do so when he finished his term at PRS he took six months out and he's now my chairman so yeah so we really really did come full circle and quite special and yeah I'm reminded of that that story all the time and he says oh I said I could barely remember the meeting I said well it's all your thought then you know awesome it's a nice balance of push and pull there with you kind of definitely go exploring this as an opportunity and then other people kind of pulling you along and saying you've got to do it and this is massive and at what point did the hardware element come in because obviously you now have detector devices that help gather some of the data so when did that come into the planning and how did you go about that because that adds a whole extra element with manufacturing and sourcing bits and all that sort of stuff completely so very early so the initial prototype was built on a raspberry pi device with a usb mic because i just wanted to go can i deliver some code onto a relatively small device small amount of memory i hadn't even thought about multiple single microphones hadn't even really gone into those problems just went can i build our own code base that can recognize a piece of audio and then report it back based on a small database and actually built it on some of my own music originally just to go hey does that work which we did and I guess the second obsession is part of that because most of my I said the professional career is kind of the after after band life career was in and around financial services and technology I've always had this obsession with kind of privacy GDPR ISO 27000 etc making sure that everything is as secure and as private as it could be and part of what I did I guess through that research is I looked at patterns for how other people were doing it, A, to make sure I wasn't infringing, of course, but also to go, what happens?

8:00And most of the audio recognition companies were storing the audio. So, you know, if you're using a Shazam and you send that clip of audio to their cloud to do the analytics for you, they will take that 10, 20, 30 seconds clip and they will hold that essentially forever because it's permission-led. And I was kind of going, well, actually, this is going to be more in environments like retails, like cafes, where people could be having very, very personal conversations that you wouldn't want to store unbeknowing that we're doing it despite any signs of things out. So it was like, how could we do it where we could create what we call a digital fingerprint in real time so that audio essentially was never stored, never transmitted, never went anywhere outside of it.

8:41And I always joke, you know, you would get more audio by standing next to one of our audio meters than you would actually trying to hack our system and getting anything out of it. So that's kind of how the premise went. Once I got that, actually, the next moment was I knew I needed to build it into a hardware product. I knew Raspberry Pi devices weren't pretty enough to go into these environments and really sustainable to go long term. So my daughter was born just as I was creating Ordu. And we bought a nightlight for her bedroom. And it's like one of those little ring ones that goes into just the socket and takes no more than that.

9:16and the moment was oh my if I could build it into just that into a plug into something that is super small super discreet and stays out the way that was it and then the best bit is I employed some of the best hardware people around and they went off and just solved the problem and you know I could bore you with probably two years worth of iterations and plastic molds and components and everything that came along with that and and all the problems along that way because you know you can't make a mistake on hardware it has to be right particularly when you're going into volumes and manufacturing and yeah that was it yeah i agree that probably is a whole episode just discussing the manufacturing journey and i appreciate it can be difficult but the product is very smart and slick so you did a great job and then the incentives are very clear for the rights holders and those getting the royalties but the venues how did you start to approach them get buy-in from the industry that they needed this and presumably there's a kind of carrot stick element where it's you kind of need to do this because you've got to be compliant how did you kind of usher that side of the industry along so I think I always think of it as a bit of a lucky and a false start.

10:34So we were going through design and iteration stage generally during the pandemic. So it was kind of useful in one way because there wasn't a real hard time pressure because we didn't know when the world was going to open up. But also we were still burning cash, didn't see revenue coming in and we had to kind of figure that through. And once we were ready and we were in a position where we were like, okay, this is working, we can take it out to the real world now, we needed a customer. Well, that was definitely a moment when we couldn't leave our houses for the UK other than basically to to pop and get some food or go for a jug around the block so i kind of did that went back to the old linkedin and went okay where in the world looks pretty normal right now and the answer was australia it's like well they speak the same language and i can reach out to some people down and that's what we did so i messaged quite a few people in they're called apra which is the australian performing rights association so you know essentially introducing us what we do and what we wanted to do and their coo came back to me as this sounds really interesting this is you know it's definitely a problem that we have how do you propose we do this you jump on a zoom you explain what you're doing and he said look he said i'm happy to be your first pilot he said you know tell send me your numbers send me the commercials how are you going to do these how are you going to get these out there because i'm thinking we've literally tested them in our homes been using the postal system between the team and i to make sure they work we've now got to deploy them on the opposite side of the world in environments that we can't even physically see and actually the answer to that was look for a business that i knew thought would understand those environments so created a partnership with a cctv business and said hey guys look you know i've got like 20 of these devices that i need to send out a can you plug them in because we just need to make sure they connect because they all had sim cards in them we didn't want to use people's wi-fi so the sim provider had said yeah it'll just work but you know you still you still want to make sure before the customer sees it that it does and they did so we shipped them out uh one of the guys plugged them all in at home and it was like yep every single one connected that was like the first hallelujah of oh my god this this really is going to work and then the second point was yeah they with apra we worked out and said okay let's look at a variety of environments because you don't you don't want to just put this in cafes so we we went into leisure centers we went to traditional retail we definitely went to cafes and hotels dance studios as well and we just ran it for about i think it's about eight weeks that that kind of first pilot just to go hey does it work is it discreet enough is everybody happy what do you think from there and the results that came back were completely different to what they would normally see in their proxy data set so of course they were like okay let's scale this let's get moving essentially so we obviously went through deal we needed to go through manufacturing have the funding to do it work with them in a really really good way and i always say that the relationship with opera it's you know it's one of our favorites because it's a special one because it's our it's our first one i went out just as australia was reopening that you could get in without having to sit into a hotel room for a couple of weeks and and one of those moments our first install was at a an aquatic center on the outskirts of sydney called the lane cove aquatic center all i wanted to do was go and visit it because to me that was you know that was the first place that was our ground zero that was you know where we kind of broke ground and we and we did it first and definitely took pictures and people were looking at me going who is this weird guy why is he why has he done this and actually what apra did with the end users you know they would describe them as licensees because they're the guys that paid the license to to play the music was they went out with an invite they said look you know this is how we've done it for years this is a new solution that we want to bring forward we would love for your business to accept one and it's a completely opt-in knowing that we weren't going to get to 100 of venues they also did something really tactical so the first 100 installs we did each audio meter we had a sticker on the front and it was named after an artist a big australian artist you know it was a kylie minoguan there was a tame impala and stuff and they did this to a try and incentivize the venues but some of the artists wanted to know where theirs was as well so i always remember the great australian singer songwriter called cast sultana and hers was in this little coffee shop and she was like instagramming it and this was a tiny little coffee shop and you got somebody with probably a million plus followers instagramming that her audio meter was in there and then that actually drove more and more inquiries to it so that's been really cool for the end user the end licensee there's been two sides lots of them go hey i just want to know that my the money that i pay is now going to the right people so they almost see kind of like a social responsibility in that as well but the other one is that they just go hey look like as long as it doesn't cost me anything and he's just out of the way and i don't have to do anything then cool you know whatever and we are 16 countries around the world to to date i know of two no's that we've had one of them was a uk one a couple of years ago it was actually quite central london and we had an incoming email from the business owner so we'd been in as part of a partnership with the rights organization and put it in because they'd had permission and basically the business owner basically sent us an email saying come and get this out and it wasn't far from our office so our cmo and i we were like well let's let's just go down we'll smooth this over we'll see if we can you know keep that one in there and honestly the guy might as well have had like a tinfoil hat on he was saying oh you're selling my conversations to boris johnson and this that the other we're going you know what you just you just got to walk away on these you just got to leave it and let it go so so yeah so we've seen this really nice mix and on almost a daily basis now we have business owners venues and i'm talking everything from a tiny little florist to you know multinational cafe operators coffee shop operators coming to us saying hey what do we need to do to get one you know because we we really want to make sure that this is flowing through and we see the importance of of you know kind of helping that creative community as well so they basically end up paying the same amount but it's going to the reason that we call it an audio meter is think of it like you're when you had a smart meter at home i always remember a guy knocking my door and saying hey i'm here with you you know your new smart meter we had the little screen on that in our kitchen side for a few days and i was like wow is that how much it cost us on electricity every day i need to put that in a cupboard i need to forget about it and actually my realization was actually no longer do they have somebody knocking my door every quarter saying i'm here to to read your meter it's just all all automated and that's exactly what we are to the music industry essentially we're going guys that you've solved the license you don't need to send somebody out with a survey you don't need to think about proxy data this will give you real world data about exactly what's going on second by second location by location and sector by sector so they can really, really analyse that to make those.

17:13It's very much about getting the right money to the right people and not costing the licencee a penny more. Very clean solution there. And you've obviously, you briefly snuck it in earlier, but you mentioned that you've got some incredible names behind you. So you've had some backing from big people in the music industry, which I'm sure adds a little extra credibility to everything. So tell us a bit about how those, let's call them partnerships, kind of came about and what it's like having very high profile investors on board. I always joke, it generally spiralled and we never actually went out to anybody.

17:52So the first kind of big name investor was Bjorn Olveus from ABBA. So I did an interview on the BBC and Bjorn clearly saw it. oh somebody sent it here because I had an incoming email from Bjorn introducing himself as a singer songwriter it was genuinely the email I've still got it you know it says hi Ryan my name is Bjorn and I'm a singer songwriter and it's like yeah I know you know and I grew up dancing to you you know my parents Bjorn so and actually so I of course went back to him said I'd love to tell you more I mean who doesn't want to have a zoom meeting with Bjorn and tell him all about your business and what you're doing and right at the end of the call he said to me he said oh he said if you ever need investment it's you know let me know so I did a friends and family 150k round then did a million seed round and then did a five million round and that five million round was being led by a single family office UK based not for music you know kind of actually quite quite private about how how they do things and everything was locked down we got about 10 days to go till exchange and I had to phone them and say can I reduce your amount of it and I could see they about to scream at me and I was like because Bjorn from ABBA wants to confess and they're like oh hell yes you know make that happen and we we actually then named around the series ABBA because we thought you know let's let's have a little bit of fun with it and Bjorn is amazing because he will every now and then just ring me for a catch-up or if I go to him say hey have you seen this you know we're trying to get into this society I saw that you spoke in that country or something and he'll really help and actually it's been a real word of mouth thing so Bjorn then saw Paul McCartney's team told them about us they inquired and actually we met them in leading into our next round which we then aptly named the series beetle you know so yeah it's i think all artists are they don't want to be paid for something that they haven't done but also they want to make sure that they're supporting the next generation as well and then it was paul's team who told elton's team so we skip c and d but then we go to our series elton and yeah and i remember speaking to david furnished for the first time and David was again so passionate about everything they do.

19:58Elson has a reputation for championing young talents as well. It's great that he can champion it and play it or get them to join them on stage at Glastonbury or wherever but actually helping them get paid is pretty cool to their journey as well so yeah and then after those guys Adam from U2 also invested and then Adele came in on our last round as well and again it's just all been through one of our board members or advisors has bumped into somebody they've said oh you know do you know about or do and they've talked about it and then before you know it you're getting a call from somebody saying hey can one of the guys from U2 invest you're like I think we'll find a way guys don't worry we'll open a mini round well whatever we need to do we'll make it work right yeah it's awesome I mean it's great that you're working in an industry where you can pick up those names along the way and it does help people who have audience and brand and distribution it's going to support in ways that you can't even imagine whether it's through hiring commercial partnerships etc etc so it's great and it's so good that you're backed by so many top top names from the industry and then obviously the company must have changed quite a lot since those early days and you've grown quite a bit what are your plans going forwards where do you see all do over the few years what do you want to do with the company yeah so i think for us what we've seen in in the way that we've implemented is most of the territory if we go into dip their toes in so they start relatively small a few hundred locations and then they start to play with the data because it is generally such a swing there was a market that we launched last year and when they looked at how they would have distributed versus the data that we'd done on the first implementation there was like a 94 variance in there and they were kind of going we probably can't even swing this much because it's going to create bigger questions probably bigger legal issues as well so what they do is they're increasing their weighting to our data every quarter and they're moving it over and of course PR and incoming it and actually I was on the phone to them this morning because they just placed their third order to go we need to go bigger we think there's some locations some cities that we're missing in this country this territory that we need to go for so I think all the markets that we're in will just increase in volume do it we'll definitely enter new markets and one of the things that we're also now seeing is take Asia Pacific because the Australians have worked with us so much and they're so deep and they're doing so much of their distribution based on what we what we provide to them they're now putting pressure on their partners so you know if an Australian artist say is played in Singapore the Singaporean society collects that money and they send it to the Australian society who sends it to the artist so they're going essentially across their region and going guys look we've invested all of this we are definitely more accurate in everything that we're doing there's a reciprocal deal here so we want to see reciprocal value in data we want to know we just want to get what's fairly at if an Australian artist genuinely is trending in South Korea or Japan or even the UK or anywhere else they want to make sure that that is tracked correctly reported and that that money flows back and goes through and then really the next big thing for us is we've just signed our first deal in the Middle East as well so we're in the middle of our incorporation out there our first subsidiary model out of the Middle East as well and that's a fascinating region for us because if you look at Europe, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, rights organisations have been around say kind of up to 100 years.

23:15In the Middle East, royalties have never really been collected in public performance. So it's a really, really new thing. So one of the first societies out there got their licence last year. We've already created our partnership with them to go in and actually they're going, hey, we're not solving a 100 year old problem. We're going in and we're having to sell a licence from Fresh. We might as well take the audio meter in and just plug it in as we go and show complete accuracy from day one. So it's a really, really different model for us to operate, you know, to really do it in partnership with them.

23:44They want to see our people in market. So that's kind of cool that, as I say, we're getting that incorporation set up as well. So it feels like a good time tactically, you know, when winter gets really cold here to be like, need to pop out to the office out there, you know, and go and get some vitamin D. And yeah, it's really good. Absolutely. And that must be very satisfying that a new market that it's almost like creating their model is using you as the standard. That's a great, great signal. You've actually changed the industry. It's brilliant. Definitely. I know, we're really pleased. If there was one bit of advice you'd give to other founders, what would it be?

24:20First of all, if you're thinking about doing it, do it. Because I've had people say, I'm not sure if I should do it. And I'm like, you're never going to know. So just go and do it. And the second one for me, and I've been really guilty of this, is got to celebrate wins. And we had quite a few major wins during COVID. So there's a pitch competition called Midem, which is almost like the Grammy of music technology. And we won that during lockdown. I did the whole thing by Zoom and it was like we won it. We recorded a Zoom and went home and, you know, I'm still sat at home and there wasn't really anything to celebrate or launching into a new market.

24:52So I think you've really, really got to celebrate kind of those wins and have everybody together as you do them. I think that's a really, really important thing as well. And then I think just the final third piece that I would say is, I think founders, we're control freaks. You want to be in control of everything. You want it now. You need to be on top of everything. And actually, the family office who invested in this, they spent a lot of time supporting me as well as I've gone through the journey, is quite often they say, you do realise that can wait till tomorrow, right? Or till the end of the week.

25:20And you do go from working stupid hours, which is unhealthy at times, you know, both physically and mentally. and the amount of times like yeah I can see something on a Thursday evening or a Friday afternoon and go you know what that can just wait till next week it doesn't matter if I reply to it today or then having that time to get away and breathe it gives you the thinking time that sometimes you need and you can come out with a much better outcome on something you need to do. I think great advice I mean I think also as companies get bigger the only reason it gets going is by having that kind of urgency and that effort to push everything through as quickly as possible but as the company grows the decisions become a bit more like impactful of you know which way do we steer the ship and sometimes it's helpful to actually go let's just cool the jets slightly and take our time to make the decision and if it waits till monday i might have new data or information by that point anyway yeah awesome so ryan we're going to move on to our final two questions so the first is a future unicorn prediction so this is another company maybe that you've spotted that you think has a lot of potential?

26:24I'm going to have to go with one because they're slightly friends. So they're called Sea Views, Tim and Andy or Tim and Noxy. They're really cool business. They are all about YouTube and driving content that is not just boring advertising content. But if you're a petrol head and you're watching lots of car stuff, they can serve you better related content, normally with a commercial angle to it. So absolutely love what those guys are doing. and they actually came and shared our office with us last year as well as they were getting started as well and they are just really really good guys and i think any ad tech has got huge growth space as well so it's a little bit because they're friends and i love them but genuinely that could be absolutely huge and game-changing for that industry and then the final question is our dinner party guest game it's just a bit of fun to end the show so if you can have dinner with any three people who would they be so the first one i'll say will be tom de long so the lead singer of Blink 182 because they were my favourite band growing up.

27:18He's just a childhood hero of mine so it's got to be Tom. Second one I would go for, so I used to like really impactful stuff, maybe like a Jane Goddard who went and basically gave her life to conservation of chimpanzees and what she did there and third, I'm going to go a bit corny, I'm going to say well I'd have to take my daughter along, she's only seven and she probably wouldn't get most of it but as a dad of a little girl you always want her by your side so I think she would be the final one to join us. Well, Ryan, thank you so much for coming on. It's been really great to hear your writing unicorn story.

27:49There's so much in there, particularly about just sort of tackling things with first principles, really. It's just like, whenever you hit an obstacle, it felt like you blew through that by kind of finding someone to partner with or getting someone else's opinion, which then led to another door opening. And I think there's a lot of great messaging in that in terms of giving people that feeling of just keep going, find the solution. It's okay. I know what I'm working towards. and the North Star. It's a wiggly route along the way, but you get there eventually. So congrats on everything you've achieved and congrats on becoming the standard for measuring music, royalty rights and building a massive data company.

28:27Thank you. Thanks for having me. That's it for this week. Thanks very much for listening. To stay up to date with the latest episodes, please follow or subscribe on your favourite podcast platform. We also have a newsletter called Reading Unicorns, which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox. please tell your friends about it and we'll see you on the next episode this episode is sponsored by cpoint the business account built for startups if you're a startup founder fed up with finance admin you need cpoint cpoint is different to neobanks because it connects all your bank accounts and your strike account to see your cash position burn and runway instantly it automates bookkeeping by pulling invoices and receipts from your whole team's inboxes so you just sync everything to zero and pay outstanding bills with a click.

29:11It has a 3.49 % yield on Treasury and real human customer support. Find out more at cpoint.co That's S-E-A-P-O-I-N-T dot co. Use code UNICORN for a free month. Cpoint Treasury is a money market fund. Rate recorded at 1st of October 2026. Rates are variable and subject to change. Capital at risk.