In a merger that brings together the world’s top players in digital music and broadcast rights administration and reporting, global music technology platform Orfium has acquired London-based Soundmouse.
Rob Wells, CEO of Orfium and former President of Global Digital at Universal Music Group, welcomed the agreement as a watershed decision for media firms and rights holders.
“Bringing Soundmouse into the Orfium family, we are moving to a place where we can serve the entire entertainment ecosystem across mainstream and digital media. By connecting creators, rights holders, and music users, we can deliver more value to stakeholders across the board,” Rob Wells said.
Drew Delis and Chris Mohoney established Orfium in 2015 intending to advance technology in the field of music rights management. Rob Wells joined the organization in 2017, and he has since assisted in making it a dependable partner for music publishers, record labels, production music companies, and collecting societies.
“Making music easier to find, use, track and monetise across all channels is one of the core problems we’re helping to solve for the industry. Our software, built on machine learning and AI advances, empowers rights owners, creators and key stakeholders to realise more value as new platforms for media consumption emerge and scale. There is no other company in this space building and investing in technology like Orfium. Acquiring Soundmouse enables us to scale our product offering and expand deeper into the complex infrastructure of the entertainment industry, streamlining content creation and management for programme-makers, broadcasters and music rights holders,” Well added.
Orfium’s technology has helped its partners, who include some of the biggest record labels and music publishers in the world, earn hundreds of millions of dollars more. Orfium continues to develop and provide the technology required to enable the Metaverse and Web3 at a time when it has never been more difficult for creators, rights holders, and media companies to track and monetize the usage.
By bringing together all parties involved in the reporting process, including broadcasters, producers, collecting societies, distributors, programmers, and music artists themselves, Soundmouse has established a global standard for cue sheets and music reporting. It works for significant media organisations, streaming services, and broadcasters.
“Over the past 20 years, Soundmouse has been building and setting the standard in cue sheet management and monitoring for the broadcast and entertainment production space. Combine that with Orfium’s expertise in UGC tracking and claiming for publishers, labels and production music companies and we bring the worlds of digital and broadcast together in an integrated way. There is a huge amount of synergy between our companies which will allow us to deliver even more benefits to creators, rights holders, broadcasters and collecting societies with cutting-edge technology and industry expertise,” Soundmouse Co-CEO, Charles Hodgkinson, said.
