Orfium acquires music reporting service Soundmouse

The arrangement forms part of Orfium’s expansion efforts, and an overall vision to solve the entertainment industry’s most complex challenges. The acquisition is expected to revolutionise digital music and broadcast rights.

Orfium offers software, data and licensing solutions to the entertainment industry. Its technology has generated hundreds of millions of dollars in additional revenue for its partners, which include top global record labels and music publishers.

Soundmouse specialises in music cue sheet reporting and audio recognition services. It connects stakeholders in the reporting process including broadcasters, producers, collecting societies, distributors, programme makers and music creators themselves. It also works for major broadcasters, media companies and streaming platforms.

“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,” Orfium CEO Rob Wells, who previously served as Universal Music Group president of global digital, said. “By connecting creators, rightsholders and music users, we can deliver more value to stakeholders across the board.”

He added: “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 advances in machine learning and AI, 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 rightsholders.”

Soundmouse co-CEO Charles Hodgkinson said: “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 [user-generated content] 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, rightsholders, broadcasters and collecting societies with cutting-edge technology and industry expertise.”