Audible Magic

Audible Magic was founded in 1999 by Vance Ikezoye and Jim Schrempp. Their original goal was to create a service where radio listeners could call a number to identify a song that was playing and purchase it. Instead of using metadata and other digital descriptors, the company found a way to use the digital signature of the song itself to track and identify it.[1][2][3]

In October 2000, Audible Magic acquired MuscleFish LLC, a developer of a real-time speech/music audio classifier.[4][5]

In 2001, the company partnered with streaming audience size and demographics tracking company MeasureCast to provide the first verification and demographic reporting service for online advertisements.[6]

In October 2002, Audible Magic signed a deal with its first major label, British music conglomerate EMI Recorded Music to use Audible Magic's audio fingerprinting technology to track licensed and unlicenced usage of EMI's song catalog.[7]

In February 2003, the company announced the deployment of a new automated radio ad monitoring system for AM and FM radio stations across the country by New York City-based media monitoring company Video Monitoring Services of America (VMS).[8] In October, Audible Magic signed a deal with Sony Music for Audible Magic's CopySense application, to block pirated content and pornography from being traded on peer-to-peer networks.[9]

In October 2004, the company launched RepliCheck, an anti-piracy information system that identifies the title, artist, releasing label and copyright date of individual songs to curb the mass production of pirated CDs. The company signed deals with five CD manufacturers, which in turn marketed the service to music labels and independent artists.[10]

In February 2007, the social networking site Myspace launched a pilot program to block videos containing unauthorized copyrighted content from being posted in its community. The company licensed digital fingerprinting technology from Audible Magic and became the largest Internet video site to offer free video filtering to copyright holders.[11]

In 2012, Audible Magic launched Audini, a browser plug-in for automatic content recognition (ACR) services.[12]

In May 2014, Vimeo partnered with Audible Magic to launch Vimeo’s Copyright Match feature to automatically flag uploaded videos that violates copyrights.[13] In August, the company partnered with video game-streaming company Twitch to scan the site's videos-on-demand in order to identify and mute videos in which it detects copyrighted audio material.[14]

In August 2017, Audible Magic was awarded an Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, for its video ID technology to protect copyrighted content.[15]

In February 2019, Audible Magic launched two services RightsAudit and RightsRX, designed to verify music rights ownership. Sony-owned The Orchard was among the first customers to use the new services.[16] In April, Audible Magic Corporation partnered with online music distributor CD Baby to prevent copyrighted tracks from being uploaded to its service prior to delivery to a Digital Service Provider (DSP).[17] In June, Audible Magic partnered with digital distribution service DistroKid to prevent fraudulent artists from stealing and uploading unreleased original content.[18] In September, the company launched its UGC Music Rights Platform (UMRP), to help companies license and administer music rights for user- generated content (UGC) on social media.[19]

Audible Magic develops digital fingerprinting technology used to identify copyright violations for audio and video content uploaded to and distributed over the Internet. The technology uses acoustic fingerprint technology for audio and music recognition, and video fingerprint technology for content recognition of digital visual content. The company compares the digital fingerprint of uploaded content to a large database of digital representations of copyrighted songs, TV shows, and movies. If the content matches and is unlicensed, the content can be blocked.[11]

The company also provides content registration and licensing services to copyright owners. The company will enter into agreements to license with rights holders and offers rights administration services to rights holders. For companies that own or distribute music, it offers services to detect ownership conflicts. For social networks, the company provides copyright compliance, licensing and rights administration services.

Products include:

• Content Identification, used to identify audio content and/or video content[18]
• RightsRX, a service to verify copyright ownership before distribution[16]
• UGC Music Rights Platform, a platform for monetizing and licensing music, and managing rights[19]

The company has 37 granted patents related to its audio and video identification technology.[20] The areas of the patents include digital fingerprint-based media detection technology, identification of content as it flows across networks, detection of content on media playing devices, and approaches to caching and indexing its reference database to improve the performance of the system.[20]

As of March 2020, the company operates globally with offices in Los Gatos, CA and London, UK.[21]

• Official website