News Article

Billboard Magazine: January 11, 2003
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Audible Magic’s Capabilities May Charm the Industry

Company’s Digital-Fingerprinting, File-Tracking Technologies Help Copyright Owners Monitor Use of Their Content

By: CATHERINE APPLEFELD OLSON

Audible Magic, a Los Gatos, Calif.-based technology firm specializing in tracking the distribution of music across the Internet, is making a name for itself with a range of industry players, as copyright owners look to monitor consumer use of their content in everything from peer-to-peer (P2P) networks to online radio services.

Among the clients using the company’s core audio-identification technology are EMI Recorded Music (Billboard Bulletin, Oct. 15, 2002), SESAC, and CMJ Network. The technology is particularly gaining note for its anti-piracy uses, including digital fingerprinting and file tracking.

Determining Authenticity

While its various partners are slicing off different applications of the Audible Magic technology, the unifying thread is its content-based retrieval and classification system that can identify a master recording under all compression levels and across any format, from TV and radio to satellite and Internet protocol.

The technology works by “listening” to a given piece of audio and then generating a unique fingerprint for each selection. A similar technology has been in use for more than a decade by other companies around the world, including Billboard sister company Nielsen Broadcast Data Systems.

“Our mission in life is to try to help content owners get the most out of their content,” says Vance Ikezoye, Audible Magic CEO and a former engineering executive at Hewlett-Packard.

Electronic commerce services company Loudeye Technologies provides the lion’s share of sound files that Audible Magic technology can monitor. Audible Magic recently signed a new development deal with EMI—its first such pairing with a major record company—which will bring a large portion of music from the EMI catalog into its database as well.

“We want to explore ways to keep track of our artists’ work on the Internet and have a better handle on piracy issues as well as the effectiveness to counter piracy,” EMI senior VP of worldwide new media Jay Samit says. “We are working together to come up with some practical applications.”

Among the primary Audible Magic offerings of interest to EMI is the Replicheck technology suite, which provides CD replicators with an automated tool to review incoming projects for piracy.

“Some of the uses of the technology for third-party manufacturing are really innovative,” Samit says. “We are watermarking prerelease content today as a way of reducing illegal distribution of prerelease content. Now if there is a copy that ends up on an assembly line in Southeast Asia, we’ll know which one it is.”

Piracy associated with P2P distribution is another salient concern across the music industry. With its acquisition in 2001 of network-monitoring technology from Internet database firm ipArchive, Audible Magic landed a network-monitoring technology that can identify in midstream a recording that is being transferred and block the transfer if the user does not have the right to do so.

This application might be just the ticket to make P2P palatable, if not downright pleasing, to the music industry, according to Rick Riccobono, an outside music consultant who has been helping Audible Magic gain recognition among record companies.

“There is a great backlash against P2P in the industry that says, ‘Let’s stop this now because we had 10% [attrition] last year, 17% this year, second-week sales are off, and we want to kill it to combat it.’ But you have to subscribe to the idea that the consumer wants what they want when they want it,” Riccobono says. “The Audible Magic technology gives intellectual-property owners the ability to monitor P2P traffic vs. kill P2P traffic.”

Ikezoye says Audible Magic is already at work developing a system that will not only fingerprint a piece of content but also assign a watermark: “We envision that we could play a critical role in helping to first understand the scope of the problem, report on it, and then hopefully have a way to help enable control of the content across distribution media.”

Other Uses

Beyond anti-piracy applications, Audible Magic is also using its technology to monitor radio as it moves online.

Performing-rights organization SESAC, for example, entered a three-year agreement in January 2002 to use Audible Magic technology to monitor 34 terrestrial radio broadcasts utilizing Internet simulcasts as a means of better determining royalty distribution for less mainstream genres (Billboard Bulletin, Jan. 15, 2002). For CMJ, Audible Magic is providing real-time radio airplay tracking information for college and select noncommercial formats.

Audible Magic was born from a challenge presented to Ikezoye in the late ’90s to develop a service where radio listeners could call an automated number and find out the name of a song currently playing and purchase it. The problem: Stations did not generally know at a given time what song was being played in the electronic format.

“Instead of using metadata and keywords and descriptors, we thought, ‘Why can’t you use the content itself?’” Ikezoye says. “Then once we started [developing] the technology to do that, we realized that if radio stations don’t even know what’s being played, there’s got to be a whole host of other problems this technology could solve in media and entertainment.”