Tunecore's Price and Wells announce Audiam

AUDIAM, I SAID: Jeff Price and Peter Wells, the guys who founded Tunecore, have announced the formation of a YouTube monetization company they’re calling Audiam. The partners chose to make their pitch yesterday in an extended posting on Digital Music News, building to the bold assertion, “It's time to democratize and change the music industry again, this time with YouTube… And we're putting that power into the hands of independent artists… At Audiam.com they can create a free account, enter basic information about the music (title, artist), upload the .mp3, .mp4 or .wav file (also free) and click the button and we’ll take it from there. Audiam will ‘fingerprint’ it, deliver the fingerprint to YouTube, get them to start searching their vast hoard of content for any matches and identify those videos that use the music. When we find a match, we tell YouTube to ‘monetize’ it (put ads on it). Maybe the video already has ads on it? No problem, Audiam stakes the claim for the artist and starts collecting the revenue they deserve. We charge a 25% administration fee and the rest goes to the artist.” These claims occasioned a lively back-and-forth between a posse of cynics and Price, which is arguably more revealing—and definitely more entertaining—than the pitch itself; you’ll find the debate in Comments. (6/13a)