Shareholders of VNUE, Inc. (OTCQB:VNUE) are cheering the news announced today that the Company has officially closed its deal to acquire Soundstr, a technology that aims to help businesses pay fairer music license fees based on actual music usage.
The merger of VNUE's patent-pending MiC™ (Music Identification Center) system and Soundstr's own patent-pending music identification technology and hardware aims to fix the current performing rights system. Currently, venues and other businesses are somewhat discouraged from playing music due to high blanket license fees charged by the Performing Rights Organizations (PROs), in which the PROs have no idea what's actually being played – meaning that in many cases, the correct rights holders are not properly compensated.
Instead of paying these high blanket royalty rates, music licensees utilizing the Soundstr/MiC technology would only pay for music played in their establishments, and the appropriate rights holders would then be properly and transparently compensated.
"While the introduction of the Music Modernization Act is very encouraging in some areas of licensing reform, it does not begin to address the problems of General Licensing, and since it's another blanket licensing system, it could merely continue to perpetuate the inequities we see in performance licensing into mechanicals. With Soundstr, we have an incredible opportunity to fix this system that's been broken for more than 50 years, and there's a potential for $3 billion or more in royalties for general licensing that could be more fairly allocated to artists and songwriters," said VNUE CEO Zach Bair.
"Since we announced our intent to acquire Soundstr in February, it was exciting to see Spotify (NASDAQ: SPOT) follow our lead into music rights with their acquisition of Loudr. It is very clear that this is an important move for the future."
Shares of VNUE took off on this news with the stock currently up 100% at $0.06 and also currently at a 52-week high.
