Audible Magic Corporation (commonly Audible Magic) is a
Los Gatos, California
Los Gatos (, ; ) is an incorporated town in Santa Clara County, California, United States. The population is 33,529 according to the 2020 census. It is located in the San Francisco Bay Area just southwest of San Jose in the foothills of th ...
-based company that provides content identification services to social networks, record labels, music publishers, television studios, and movie studios. The company also provides digital platform music management services for Internet radio, subscription music services, on-demand streaming, and fitness and gaming applications. The services help companies identify and protect copyrighted content, manage rights and monetize media.
History
1999-2002
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.
In October 2000, Audible Magic acquired MuscleFish LLC, a developer of sound similarity and audio classification technologies.
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.
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
An acoustic fingerprint is a condensed digital summary, a fingerprint, deterministically generated from an audio signal, that can be used to identify an audio sample or quickly locate similar items in an audio database.
Practical uses of ac ...
technology to track licensed and unlicensed usage of EMI's song catalog.
2003-2007
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
Video Monitoring Services of America collects and distributes information about TV news broadcasting and its viewership.
History
Robert J. Cohen founded VMS.
'' The New York Times'' described them as "a company that tracks news programs in majo ...
(VMS). In October, Audible Magic signed a deal with
Sony Music
Sony Music Entertainment (SME), also known as simply Sony Music, is an American multinational music company. Being owned by the parent conglomerate Sony Group Corporation, it is part of the Sony Music Group, which is owned by Sony Entertainmen ...
for Audible Magic's CopySense application, to block pirated content and pornography from being traded on peer-to-peer networks.
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.
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.
2008-2017
In 2012, Audible Magic launched Audini, a browser plug-in for
automatic content recognition
Automatic content recognition (ACR) is a technology to identify content played on a media device or present within a media file. Devices implementing ACR can allow the device or the manufacturer to collect content consumption information automatic ...
(ACR) services.
In May 2014, Vimeo partnered with Audible Magic to launch Vimeo’s Copyright Match feature to automatically flag uploaded videos that violates copyrights. In August, the company partnered with video game-streaming company
Twitch
Twitch may refer to:
Biology
* Muscle contraction
** Convulsion, rapid and repeated muscle contraction and relaxation
** Fasciculation, a small, local, involuntary muscle contraction
** Myoclonic twitch, a jerk usually caused by sudden muscle co ...
to scan the site's videos-on-demand in order to identify and mute videos in which it detects copyrighted audio material.
In August 2017, Audible Magic was awarded an Emmy Award for Technology and Engineering by the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences
The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) is an American professional service organization founded in 1955 for "the advancement of the arts and sciences of television and the promotion of creative leadership for artistic, ed ...
, for its video ID technology to protect copyrighted content.
2018 to present
In February 2019, Audible Magic launched two services RightsAudit and RightsRX, designed to verify music rights ownership.
Sony
, commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...
-owned
The Orchard was among the first customers to use the new services.
In April, Audible Magic Corporation partnered with online music distributor
CD Baby
CD Baby, Inc. is an online distributor of independent music. The company was described as an "anti-label" by its parent company's Chief Operating Officer Tracy Maddux. The CD Baby music store was shut down in March 2020 with a statement that " ...
to prevent copyrighted tracks from being uploaded to its service prior to delivery to a Digital Service Provider (DSP).
In June, Audible Magic partnered with digital distribution service DistroKid to prevent fraudulent artists from stealing and uploading unreleased original content.
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.
In January 2021, Audible Magic acquired
B2B digital music platform MediaNet from Canadian performance rights organization
Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada
The Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN) is a Canadian performance rights organization that represents the performing rights of more than 135,000 songwriters, composers and music publishers. The organization collect ...
(SOCAN).
References
{{reflist, 30em
External links
Official website
1999 establishments in California
Digital rights management
Technology companies established in 1999
Companies based in Silicon Valley
Companies based in Santa Clara County, California
Los Gatos, California