Audible Magic Inks Global Partnership With DistroKid to Verify Music Authenticity

Amidst news of unreleased music impersonators, partnership ensures
protection of artist’s original content on music streaming services and
social platforms

LOS GATOS, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Audible
Magic, music’s industry standard for content identification linked
to digital rights, announced a strategic partnership with leading music
distribution service DistroKid
to combat the rising trend of “fraudulent artists” stealing and
uploading unreleased original content. The move will help protect
artists worldwide by verifying the authenticity of both tracks and
artists that the music originated from before music is
distributed to streaming services.

When an artist requests to upload song files via DistroKid, Audible
Magic’s RightsRx™ solution checks its comprehensive registry of over 20
million media assets to ensure the artist-uploaded content is
conflict-free before distribution to streaming services like Spotify,
Apple Music, YouTube and more. In its ongoing effort to promote artist
authenticity, DistroKid will also be the first distributor to implement
Audible Magic’s cutting-edge detection tool, Broad Spectrum. An
extension of Audible Magic’s ContentID service, Broad Spectrum can
uniquely identify extreme manipulations of rate, pitch and tempo using
only small clips of audio.

“In this day and age, it’s imperative for artists everywhere to register
their content to not only claim ownership, avoiding impersonators, but
to also ensure that they are being accurately credited and compensated,”
said Vance Ikezoye, president and chief executive officer at Audible
Magic. “DistroKid has a positive reputation amongst artists for making
distribution fast, reliable and easy. This partnership signals our joint
commitment to an industry working towards clean data, proper rights
management and improved artist attribution.”

Additionally, in response to the increase in fake artists attempts to
steal and distribute unreleased music, DistroKid is announcing a new and
free service called DistroLock (https://distrolock.com).
Launching today, DistroLock allows any musical artist to upload and
register their unreleased audio files through the platform, which will
encode a unique audio fingerprint and add it to Audible Magic’s
registry. DistroKid developed this platform with Audible Magic’s
insights as an industry-wide solution that will request to block the
unauthorized release of an artist’s music (or “leaks”) from appearing on
streaming services and social platforms. DistroLock also includes an API
that will allow other distributors and streaming services to easily
validate the authenticity of music uploaded to their respective
platforms before making it available to the public.

“Until now, there hasn’t been a definitive way for artists to say, ‘this
is my audio, don’t let anyone else release it,’” said DistroKid chief
executive officer Philip Kaplan. “With the launch of DistroLock, any
musician can preemptively register their audio to help ensure that
unauthorized releases don’t see the light of day. This partnership with
Audible Magic and the creation of DistroLock will help artists by
ensuring that their original content is uploaded and distributed fairly,
with accuracy and speed.”

About DistroKid

DistroKid was founded in 2013 to provide musicians, managers, and record
labels with online tools and services that are innovative, easy-to-use,
and affordable. More than 400,000 artists rely on DistroKid and include
hobbyists, up-and-coming musicians, top YouTubers, and international
superstars like 21 Savage, Ludacris, Will Smith, Tom Waits, and more.
DistroKid’s expanding array of services include music distribution,
monetization, metadata customization, storage, and promotion.
DistroKid’s small staff, coupled with largely automated backend, has
enabled DistroKid to process more than 7 million songs—while
simultaneously providing fast, personal & friendly customer service to
artists of every size.

About Audible Magic

For more than 20 years, Audible Magic has continuously created
innovative, industry-leading solutions that protect digital media and
accelerate its monetization. An Emmy-winning pioneer in proprietary
content recognition solutions, its core identification platform performs
billions of nearly instantaneous content match transactions every month.
Audible Magic has become the trusted intermediary between the majority
of rightsholders (music labels, distributors, publishers and
collectives) and digital service providers (such as Facebook,
SoundCloud, TikTok/Musical.ly, Dailymotion, Twitch, and Twitter),
navigating the complexities of content identification, ownership
determination, and rights administration.

Contacts

Julia Hutchinson
Audible Magic Corporation
j_hutchinson@audiblemagic.com