GEMA has acquired a majority stake in the SoundAware Group.
The German collection society represents the copyrights of around 90,000 members and more than two million rights-holders and plans to enhance its service with the acquisition.
Using its own music recognition technology (MRT), the Netherlands-based SoundAware provides digital services for recognising music, events and media content. It will continue to operate independently under the terms of the new deal.
Harald Heker, CEO of GEMA, said: “By investing in a music identification pioneer, we are adding an important key competence to our portfolio: digital music identification. The investment in a future-oriented technology is a decisive step for GEMA on the way to becoming a powerful digital collecting society.”
GEMA is part of ICE and MusicHub and recently acquired a majority share in digital music distributor Zebralution.
The investment in a future-oriented technology is a decisive step for GEMA
Harald Heker, GEMA
Harold de Groot, founder of SoundAware and managing director of the Group, said: “GEMA is a global pioneer in the field of copyright management. With our technology, we want to contribute to extending this lead. We are convinced that the potential of our monitoring technology is far from exhausted. With GEMA as a strong partner, we want to develop new digital services for the music industry based on this technology and distribute them internationally.”
Chairman of the Supervisory Board, Dr Ralf Weigand added: “With the SoundAware Group, we welcome another strong partner from the music industry under the GEMA umbrella. I am firmly convinced that investments such as this mark the way to GEMA's continuing success and future positioning. For our members and customers, the investment is good news, because the MRT system enables qualitative and process-related improvements in one of GEMA's core areas, the monitoring and tracking of music use. This increases the accuracy of distributions to our members, which is becoming an immense challenge for collecting societies, especially with the increasing fragmentation and small-scale nature of music use.”
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