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Love it or hate it, Christmas music is a huge part of the season, so it is widely used in public spaces to get everyone into the festive spirit!

It’s the Most Wonderful Time of year!

As Halloween nears, we thought it would be fun to look at
 our public performance data and see how the top Halloween songs are played
 throughout the year… are they consistently played or are they only played in
 October?
 
We couldn’t find a canonical Halloween song chart, so what we
 asked a friendly neighbourhood AI chatbot to work its magic and give us a top
 ten. We’ve added the public performance ranking for the song as well.
 

 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://assets.audoo.com/website/blog/sortable-table.css">

<div class="scroller">
 <table>
 <thead>
 <tr>
 <th>Rank</th>
 <th>Name</th>
 <th>Artist</th>
 <th>Pub Perf #</th>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td>1</td>
 <td>Thriller</td>
 <td>Michael Jackson</td>
 <td>2</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>2</td>
 <td>Monster Mash</td>
 <td>Bobby "Boris" Pickett</td>
 <td>9</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>3</td>
 <td>Ghostbusters</td>
 <td>Ray Parker Jr.</td>
 <td>5</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>4</td>
 <td>Spooky, Scary Skeletons</td>
 <td>Andrew Gold</td>
 <td>10</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>5</td>
 <td>Somebody's Watching Me</td>
 <td>Rockwell</td>
 <td>4</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>6</td>
 <td>This Is Halloween</td>
 <td>Disney Characters</td>
 <td>8</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>7</td>
 <td>I Put a Spell On You</td>
 <td>Screamin' Jay Hawkins</td>
 <td>7</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>8</td>
 <td>Werewolves of London</td>
 <td>Warren Zevon</td>
 <td>3</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>9</td>
 <td>Pet Sematary</td>
 <td>The Ramones</td>
 <td>6</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td>10</td>
 <td>Zombie</td>
 <td>The Cranberries</td>
 <td>1</td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
</div>
 
We have a few ways to
 look at the play data over time. There are some simple metrics like number of
 plays or listeners per day, but we also track derivative data - one of which we
 call “Hotness”. Hotness measures how much activity the song is generating each
 week, so can also indicate recent popularity. To gauge how much the songs are
 played year-round, we will use this metric.
 
Let’s take a look at our Hotness metric for each of the songs in the chart and see whether these songs are played in public performance all year long or just around Halloween...

 

<h4>1. Thriller - Michael Jackson</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 2
Looking at Hotness, we can see the song has a
 huge peak at the end of October last year, but does have playback throughout the
 year:
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/9f4ad467040c4a6e8d87bb917299d9ba.webp" alt="Thriller Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🗓 Perennial Pop
 

<h4>2. Monster Mash - Bobby "Boris" Pickett</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 9
As this song is far less popular in public performance settings than Thriller, we have less data and therefore don’t see such a defined spike:
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/b5925e6f480945e2ac07aa129fd3122e.webp" alt="Monster Mash Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🎃 Ghastly Groove
 

<h4>3. Ghostbusters - Ray Parker Jr.</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 5
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/5d8534d9a5bd4777af71aaecfc90c38e.webp" alt="Ghostbusters Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🗓️ Nonstop Knockout
 

<h4>4. Spooky, Scary Skeletons - Andrew Gold</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 10
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/584167d35a71478fb7ad1804db4accf8.webp" alt="Spooky, Scary Skeletons Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🎃 Bone-Rattling Ballad
 

<h4>5. Somebody's Watching Me - Rockwell</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 4
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/e991a0e37b0043338fce5900999e933e.webp" alt="Somebody's Watching Me Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🎃 Monster Melody
 

<h4>6. This Is Halloween - Disney Characters</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 8
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/a55a090e6ca544e980412628fbf767d7.webp" alt="This Is Halloween Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🎃 Graveyard Groove
 

<h4>7. I Put a Spell On You - Screamin' Jay Hawkins</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 7
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/d167985e77774b57a7ba9c82a6b5cfd3.webp" alt="I Put a Spell On You Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🎃 Bone-Rattling Ballad
 

<h4>8. Werewolves of London - Warren Zevon</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 7
We can see that this song is played all year around, more than the other songs so far
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/04ab23924f104204bb8c3aaf3bf205b6.webp" alt="Werewolves of London Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🗓️ Everyday Earworm
 

<h4>9. Pet Sematary - The Ramones</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 6
This is the first song on the chart which is played consistently all-year-around. There is a spike at the end of October, but it’s not that pronounced…
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/547ccd68548944c2b80d40c3753e649c.webp" alt="Pet Sematary Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🗓️ Nonstop Knockout
 

<h4>10. Zombie - The Cranberries</h4>
Public Performance Rank: 1
As might be expected for the top-ranking public performance song, we can see lots of plays all year around!

 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/0d3d7d5b4ef84751aae9cf1bb79d1457.webp" alt="Zombie Hotness over the last year" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;margin-left:0px;">
 
Verdict: 🗓️ All-Season Smash
So... despite the title, is this even a Halloween song? 😱 

Steve Robbins, CTO

As Halloween nears, we thought it would be fun to look at our public performance data and see how the top Halloween songs are played throughout the year!

Halloween Song Popularity

<h3>Introduction</h3>
TikTok recently released their <a href="https://www.musicweek.com/digital/read/catalogue-leads-tiktok-s-uk-songs-of-the-summer-2025/092575" target="_blank">Songs of the Summer 2025</a>, so following the interest in our <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/uk-charts-for-january-to-june-2025">last post</a> comparing public performance to the UK Radio and Official Charts, we 
wanted to see how TikTok’s charts stack up against our
public performance data.

 
<h3>Huge Differences</h3>
Starting at a high-level, the comparison is a little limited
since TikTok have only released a top ten chart for certain countries. For this
analysis we're concentrating on the UK and US as two major music markets. The
TikTok Songs of the Summer charts define ‘summer’ as May to August, so we've
use that same timeframe.

 I expected the differences to be noticeable - after all,
TikTok fuels viral moments while businesses curate a soundtrack to create their
sound. But the gap was even bigger than expected: not a single song in
TikTok’s UK or US top ten appeared in our respective public performance charts!
 In fact, you'll see below that I had to search our top
100,000 tracks to find some of the TikTok songs and even then I couldn't find
playback for one of them. So unfortunately, I couldn’t even make a nice overlap chart
as it would just have zeros on it 😆.

 
As with the comparison to streaming and radio charts, this again tells us that public listening is its own ecosystem. It's great to see that this statement holds up in the US as
well as the UK. 
<h3>UK Charts</h3>
When <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/uk-charts-for-january-to-june-2025">comparing the Top 40 UK data for the first half of 2025</a>, we found that public performance had a diverse range of
release decades, with 40% of songs originating from previous decades, though the
top ten was entirely from the 2020’s. Sadly, since TikTok has only released a top ten for these charts, we couldn’t dig as deeply into the differences. But we can say that outside of the top ten, we do see older songs getting a huge numbers of plays.

 
The TikTok top ten for the UK features five songs from the 2020s, followed by three from 2010s, then one from each of the 2000s and 1990s:
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/c25da365c5af41da9acba2ad9c82edd8.webp" alt="TikTok Summer Songs 2025 UK Chart Decades" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
The Public performance top ten for the UK is all from the 2020s:
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/cea1259aa93d443f8c3b714bca286407.webp" alt="Public Performance Summer Songs 2025 UK Chart Decades" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
<h3>US Charts</h3>
Next up, something new - a first look at our US data and how that compares to TikTok.
 
The data here shows a very different picture to the UK - and although we only looked at the top ten, we can see a stronger preference for older songs than the UK during this period. 
The TikTok top ten for the US features five decades of music with the 2010s coming out on top:
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/7b713278943d4d7088da7c47f424085a.webp" alt="TikTok Summer Songs 2025 US Chart Decades" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
The Public performance top ten for the US shows a mix from this century and some classics from the 1970s that we saw in the <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/uk-charts-for-january-to-june-2025">UK Top 40 analysis</a> - <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ywicffOj4" target="_blank">Dreams by Fleetwood Mac</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEeaS6fuUoA" target="_blank">Lovely Day by Bill Withers</a>:
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/9be9ff2b9dd74d54bcf330ad5b31cdd0.webp" alt="Public Performance Summer Songs 2025 US Chart Decades" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 

 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://assets.audoo.com/website/blog/sortable-table.css">
 

<h3>The Charts</h3>

As there was no overlap between the TikTok and Public Performance top ten charts, it felt like the best way to present the data was as side-by-side charts.

 

<h4>UK Top Ten</h4>

<div class="scroller">
 <table id="chart-uk">
 <thead>
 <tr>
 <th>Position</th>
 <th>Public Performance</th>
 <th>Release Year</th>
 <th> </th>
 <th>TikTok</th>
 <th>Release Year</th>
 <th>Public Performance Position</th>
 </tr>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">1</td>
 <td>Pink Pony Club - Chappell Roan</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2023</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Hold My Hand - Jess Glynne</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2015</td>
 <td class="position">933</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">2</td>
 <td>Ordinary - Alex Warren</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2025</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Soul Survivor ft. Akon - Jeezy</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2005</td>
 <td class="position">58,126</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">3</td>
 <td>Nice To Meet You - Myles Smith</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Let Down - Radiohead</td>
 <td class="position alarm">1997</td>
 <td class="position">15,147</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">4</td>
 <td>Stargazing - Myles Smith</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Rock That Body - Black Eyed Peas</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2010</td>
 <td class="position">6,320</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">5</td>
 <td>I Had Some Help - Morgan Wallen, Post Malone</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Tyrant - Beyoncé &amp; Dolly Parton</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td class="position">25,102</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">6</td>
 <td>Bad Dreams - Teddy Swims</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Your Love Is My Drug - Kesha</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2010</td>
 <td class="position">5,492</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">7</td>
 <td>A Bar Song (Tipsy) - Shaboozey</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Illegal - PinkPantheress</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2025</td>
 <td class="position">491</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">8</td>
 <td>The Door - Teddy Swims</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2023</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Shake It To The Max (Fly) - Moliy, Shenseea, Skillibeng, Silent Addy</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td class="position">4,092</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">9</td>
 <td>Love Me Not - Ravyn Lenae</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Manchild - Sabrina Carpenter</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2025</td>
 <td class="position">44</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">10</td>
 <td>Beautiful Things - Benson Boone</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Dior ft. Chrystal - MK</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2025</td>
 <td class="position">163</td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
</div>
 

<h4>US Top Ten</h4>

<div class="scroller">
 <table id="chart-uk">
 <thead>
 <tr>
 <th>Position</th>
 <th>Public Performance</th>
 <th>Release Year</th>
 <th> </th>
 <th>TikTok</th>
 <th>Release Year</th>
 <th>Public Performance Position</th>
 </tr>
 </thead> 
 <tbody>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">1</td>
 <td>Too Sweet - Hozier</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Hold My Hand - Jess Glynne</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2015</td>
 <td class="position">410</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">2</td>
 <td>Lovely Day - Bill Withers</td>
 <td class="position alarm">1977</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Soul Survivor ft. Akon - Jeezy</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2005</td>
 <td class="position">9,289</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">3</td>
 <td>Can't Stop - Red Hot Chili Peppers</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2002</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Rock That Body - Black Eyed Peas</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2010</td>
 <td class="position">7,467</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">4</td>
 <td>Float On - Modest Mouse</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2004</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Let Down - Radiohead</td>
 <td class="position alarm">1997</td>
 <td class="position">16,480</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">5</td>
 <td>Tieduprightnow - Parcels</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2018</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Whim Whamiee - Pluto &amp; Ykniece</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2025</td>
 <td class="position">10,978</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">6</td>
 <td>Feel It Still - Portugal. The Man</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2017</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Pretty Little Baby - Connie Francis</td>
 <td class="position alarm">1962</td>
 <td class="position">22,591</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">7</td>
 <td>Dreams - Fleetwood Mac</td>
 <td class="position alarm">1977</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>You Belong With Me - Taylor Swift</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2008</td>
 <td class="position">8,226</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">8</td>
 <td>back to friends - Sombr</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>My Main ft. Ty Dolla $ign - Mila J</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2014</td>
 <td class="position">98,362</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">9</td>
 <td>Mr. Brightside - The Killers</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2007</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Your Love Is My Drug - Kesha</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2010</td>
 <td class="position">1,890</td>
 </tr>
 <tr>
 <td class="position">10</td>
 <td>Cinderella - Remi Wolf</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2024</td>
 <td> </td>
 <td>Mad Again - BunnaB</td>
 <td class="position alarm">2025</td>
 <td class="position">No plays</td>
 </tr>
 </tbody>
 </table>
</div>
 
<h3>In Summary</h3>
The takeaway? TikTok hits and public performance
favourites are worlds apart. When comparing TikTok to Public Performance,
we can see that the songs played are completely different. We can also see that
at least during the summer months, the US and UK Public Performance plays are
wildly different as well.
 

Steve Robbins, CTO

We compare the TikTok Songs of the Summer 2025 UK and US charts with what we've seen in the largest ever set of public performance data

Let’s Compare the TikTok Songs of the Summer 2025 UK and US Charts with What We've Seen in the Largest Ever Set of Public Performance Data

<h3>Introduction</h3>
The UK Official Charts company recently released their <a href="https://www.officialcharts.com/chart-news/the-official-biggest-songs-of-2025-so-far/" target="_blank">chart</a> for "the most-streamed and best-selling tracks of 2025 so far in the UK" covering&nbsp;January to end of June 2025.&nbsp;It’s the definitive view of what people have been listening
to privately - on headphones, at home, or on the go. 
But until now, there’s been a major gap in our understanding
of music consumption when it comes to what people are actually listening to
in public. Historically, accurately tracking public performance plays
at scale - the music played in bars, cafés, shops, gyms, hotels, and other public
venues - has been near impossible. Without precise data, a true public
performance “chart” simply didn’t exist. Trends could only be estimated, based
on anecdote or proxy measures like radio plays. That’s all changed. Thanks to our Audio Meters – now
installed across UK venues, we’ve created the largest (and growing), most
accurate dataset of public performance plays ever compiled. For the first time,
it’s possible to map out what’s soundtracking our shared public spaces and
compare it directly to streaming and radio consumption. This is ground-breaking work, and the results are
fascinating. Public Performance has its own rhythm, shaped by the atmosphere
venues want to create and the audiences they serve. Some differences are
obvious when you consider them - funnily enough, far less parental-advisory
content is played in public places compared to streaming, and way more timeless
"classics" from decades past. Others are surprising, revealing how
cultural moments, live tours, and viral trends seep into the music we hear
around us. So, we decided to do something that’s never been done
before: put the UK’s first public performance Top 40 side-by-side with the
Official UK Charts and Radio airplay rankings – and see just how different the
worlds of streaming, radio, and public listening really are. 
<h3>Overlaps</h3>
Starting at a high-level, the differences are clear. When we
line up the three charts, the overlaps are far smaller than you might expect: Just over half of the songs from public performance appear
in the UK Official Chart (22 out of 40) or UK Radio charts&nbsp;(21 out of 40). When comparing the UK Official Chart and Radio chart, 26 out of 40 songs are the same: 
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/47da8a14c5514284ac5ac8535bc920ca.webp" alt="UK Chart Overlap Jan - June 2025" style="width:70%;max-width:800px;">
 
This tells us something important: public listening is
not just a slower version of the streaming or radio charts - it’s an entirely
different ecosystem. 
<h3>Recent vs Classic songs</h3>
One of the clearest differences comes from looking at
release dates. As hinted above, part of the reason for the small overlap is the
playing of more&nbsp;"classic" songs, reflecting the fact that venue
playlists are often built for mood and familiarity as much as novelty. This can be seen if we take a look at the release dates in
the charts:
The Top 40 UK Radio Chart content is 100% from the 2020s: 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/e9538bf22d454b48b82071d32f5f7795.webp" alt="UK Radio Chart Decades Jan - June 2025" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
The Top 40 Official Streaming and Download Chart
content is almost entirely from the 2020s, with one song from the 2000s
and one from the 1990s: 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/9f143217e3124e59ba92ef2b78b564cd.webp" alt="UK Radio Chart Decades Jan - June 2025" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
Public performance content is far more diverse with
only 60% (24 songs) from the 2020s, and the rest stretching back
across every decade from the 1960s onwards: 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/a56c54eaa1da4eb88ce57c7616906efc.webp" alt="UK Radio Chart Decades Jan - June 2025" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
Digging a bit deeper, we see that 87% of the Radio
Chart (35 songs) and 82% of the Official Chart (33 songs) are
from the last year alone, compared to only 34% of the public
performance data (17 songs): 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/c31d83b555b344629bae7fc374c72ec3.webp" alt="Number of Songs from 2024 - 2025" style="width:70%;max-width:600px;">
 
That balance, between fresh hits and enduring favourites, is
part of what makes the public performance chart so unique, and why it’s never
looked like anything we’ve seen before. 
<h3>Trends</h3>
That isn't to say that the good folk selecting their tunes&nbsp;for public performance are not keeping an eye on trends - Bruce Springsteen made it into the public performance&nbsp;Top 30 with <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=129kuDCQtHs" target="_blank">Dancing in the Dark</a>, where we can see more plays around May ahead of the concerts he played in the UK. 
At the other end of the scale for generational trends, 90s hit <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZXLLMbJdZ4" target="_blank">There She Goes by The La's</a> topped this <a href="https://buffer.com/resources/trending-songs-tiktok/" target="_blank">TikTok chart</a>&nbsp;and we can see it features at number 34 in the public performance data. Similarly, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ywicffOj4" target="_blank">Dreams by Fleetwood Mac</a>&nbsp;has been big on TikTok over the last year and came in at number 37.
 None of these songs are in the Official Streaming or Radio
charts, proving that public performance charts are not simply “catching up” to
other platforms but following their own distinct path.
 
<h3>Classics</h3>
You'll see that there are loads more classic songs played in
pubs, bars, hotels, restaurants and other premises that just aren't represented
by streaming or radio playback. The public performance Top 40 includes some big
artists as they are played more, but there is always huge long-tail of songs we
recognise. But here’s the groundbreaking part: even these chart-toppers
are just the tip of the iceberg. Our&nbsp;public performance Top 40 songs
only represent 2.2% of all the plays&nbsp;we saw during the first half of the
year - meaning there are millions of plays for smaller artists that just
wouldn't be recognised without our Audio Meters! 
Without our Audio Meter data, this long-tail of music would
remain completely invisible – and the artists behind those songs wouldn’t get
the recognition or royalties they deserve. 
<h3>The Charts</h3>
Now, without further ado, here are the songs that made up
the first half of 2025 across the UK Official Charts, Radio and public
performance plays. You can click the column headers to sort by the chart
positions and explore the relative positions across the charts...
 

 <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="https://assets.audoo.com/website/blog/sortable-table.css">

<div class="scroller">
 <table id="sortableTable">
 <thead>
 </thead>
 <tbody>
 </tbody>
 </table>
 
</div>
 
<h3>Summary</h3>
For years, music charts have been defined by streaming, physical/digital
sales, &amp; radio play. Public performance - the soundtrack to our shared
spaces - has never had a seat at the table. Now, for the first time in history, we can measure it
accurately. And as these charts show, it’s a world all of its own: a blend of
current hits, cultural touchpoints, and enduring classics that you won’t find
replicated anywhere else. I hope you've enjoyed digging into these charts…It turns out
that public performance, streaming, radio play and physical sales are really
nothing alike! 

Steve Robbins, CTO

We compare the UK Official Charts Company streaming / download chart and UK radio plays for the first half of 2025 with what we've seen in the UK’s largest ever set of public performance data

UK Charts for January to June 2025

UK Chart Comparison for January to June 2025 

Following up from the <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/audoo-system-architecture">Architecture Overview</a>&nbsp;post, this post goes into more detail on how our Audio Meters securely recognise music whilst respecting the privacy of the venues we're installed in. Given the Audio Meter has microphones front and centre of its design, it's a question we often get asked far too often!
 
Privacy
Hopefully you are familiar with&nbsp;smart speakers such as Amazon Echo, Google Home and the associated technologies&nbsp;built into televisions where you can ask that your lights to be turned on or favourite playlist&nbsp;played. With the convenience of these devices came <a href="https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/alexa-help-me-which-smart-speaker-has-the-best-privacy/">privacy concerns</a> once people realised that&nbsp;the microphones are always listening for voice commands. The speakers typically have&nbsp;a small amount&nbsp;of processing on the speaker that detects the "wake words" (i.e. "Hey Google...", or "Alexa..."), but once those words are detected, the recorded audio is <a href="https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-amazon-echo-privacy-generative-ai/">typically sent to the vendor's cloud</a> to&nbsp;determine what action to take. As smart speakers are interested in what has been spoken so they can take the appropriate action, they&nbsp;actively work&nbsp;to remove echos, music and other background noise to isolate voice frequencies.
 
Our Audio
 Meters, on the other hand, operate in the opposite way to smart speakers. They are
 not interested in conversations – in fact, conversations can actually get in
 the way of music recognition! We've designed the Audio Meter with privacy at its
 core and as part of that, it actively works to remove conversational noise
 (e.g. think loud talking or singing in a busy bar or restaurant) to get to the
 underlying music.
 
The Audio Meter also does
 not continuously use the microphones – instead, we take a short sample every
 few seconds for music identification.&nbsp;A further key difference&nbsp;is
 that&nbsp;no audio is sent to our cloud -&nbsp;we do all the audio processing on
 the Audio Meter. We then run <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning">machine learning</a> models on the sound to reduce
 noise and isolate the music before we perform the final step of creating
 an&nbsp;<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint">acoustic fingerprint</a>. The
 fingerprint is a short representation of the acoustic characteristics within
 the audio&nbsp;that is sent securely to our cloud for recognition. In
 summary,&nbsp;we have no way of hearing what is happening in the venues where
 we are installed.
 
Security
One key
 principle of security is to operate "defence in depth" - this
 essentially means having multiple layers of security to prevent, detect and
 respond to threats.
 Our Audio
 Meters and cloud platform were designed and built with industry-leading
 security standards in mind. We've implemented robust development processes and
 ongoing measures to ensure their integrity, and we continue to regularly review
 and strengthen these systems.
 
Here are some of the practical outcomes for our Audio Meters:
<ul>
 <li>The Audio Meters are locked down so they
 cannot be connected to by&nbsp;an attacker to allow them access to the
 memory storing the audio - either on a local network or through a cable.</li>
 <li>They only connect to our
 cloud platform and use industry-standard secure communications to prevent
 man-in-the-middle attacks or other spoofing.</li>
 <li>The software on Audio
 Meters is securely controlled by&nbsp;Audoo and locked with private keys that
 are stored on the Audio Meter in our factory, so rogue software can never be
 accepted and installed during over the air upgrades or through direct access.</li>
</ul>
 
In our cloud platform, we get many security advantages from hosting with Amazon Web Services (AWS) such as <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/data-center/controls/">physical data centre security</a>, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/iso-27001-faqs/">ISO27001 certification for key infrastructure</a>&nbsp;and many services&nbsp;to develop with. Without getting too technical about it, here are the key features we use in our cloud platform to ensure security of the data we gather:
<ul>
 <li>Audit logging&nbsp;providing compliance and risk auditing</li>
 <li>Identity and access control – lock down access to defined user accounts and roles</li>
 <li>Secure networking and firewalls locking down network traffic and logging access</li>
 <li>Data segregation and end-user roles ensuring access to data is restricted</li>
 <li>Data Encryption – all data is transmitted over encrypted connections and all data stored is encrypted on disk</li>
</ul>
 
We made a short video that shows our approach to&nbsp;privacy and security:
<div class="ratio ratio-16x9"><iframe src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Of3MH0E5XOc?rel=0" title="YouTube video" allowfullscreen=""></iframe></div>
 
I hope this post helped explain how our Audio Meters operate while respecting the privacy of venues we're installed in.
If you have questions, please <a href="https://audoo.com/contact">get in touch</a>...
Cheers,
 
 Steve

Steve Robbins CTO

A look into how our Audio Meters recognise music whilst upholding privacy.

Privacy and Security at Audoo

The last weekend in February saw the 5th instalment of <a href="https://measureofmusic.com/" target="_blank">Measure of Music</a>, a virtual event celebrating music, tech &amp; data in a weekend
long conference and hackathon. The event attracted a diverse group of speakers
and participants from a variety of backgrounds, from 71 countries and 17 time-zones
around the world - this year was bigger than ever! Audoo is proud to have sponsored this year’s event, and to kick-off
the weekend by speaking about the importance of accurate public performance
data within the music industry, and how it enables accurate distribution of
performance royalties to artists, writers and rightsholders (<a href="https://conference.measureofmusic.com/talks/measure-of-music-friday-kick-off-with-audoo/" target="_blank">watch replay</a>).
It was a pleasure to provide real-world data collected from our Audio
Meters across four territories and three continents. A huge thanks goes to our engineering team, who dedicated
their weekends to help and mentor participants throughout the weekend wherever
possible. It was impressive to see so many participants committed to their
projects and delivering the best pitches they could after a gruelling 48 hours.
Hearing teams discuss how public performance data can be used to train models and add value to
artist marketing/audience development strategies was especially pleasing! <img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/165f1b385cb54eb0a87a9d3d606c3750.webp" width="567" style="width: 567px; margin: 0px auto; display: block;"> Congratulations to the winning team (Team 6) for
their pitch on Gigatlas, a platform for simplified data-driven tour
planning. Gigatlas was proposed as a one-stop-shop helping artists plan tours
based on audience data, venue location and predicted travel costs. A great initiative
for independent and emerging artists, and another example where Audoo public
performance data could be used to identify and validate potential audiences. <img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/6ef9419a460f4c80ad12fd8bc6e6dca5.webp" alt="" width="634" height="353" style="display: block; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"> For example, if Luminate and Chartmetric data help to
identify audiences using streaming data, Audoo&nbsp;public performance data can help to validate these audiences and propose new ones based on the traction of track/artist plays by within industry sectors and commercial premises. <blockquote>Understanding where and when music is consumed in the
commercial sector can help to surface data-driven insights, and identify new potential audiences or placements for artists.</blockquote> Well done again to everyone involved – organisers, participants,
mentors and speakers. We look forward to seeing what's in store for next year's event. <ul><li>If you’re a creator,
rightsholder or PRO/CMO interested in hearing how we can support you - head to <a href="https://audoo.com/technology/background">our solutions</a>&nbsp;pages or reach
out for a demo. </li><li>If you want a deeper dive into our technology - check out this <a href="https://audoo.com/news/blog/audoo-system-architecture" target="_blank">system architecture blog</a> from our CTO Steve Robbins.</li></ul> Hash Riaz,&nbsp;Head of Product

Audoo sponsors this year's Measure of Music 2025 event, a virtual event celebrating music, tech & data in a weekend-long conference and hackathon.

Audoo x Measure of Music 2025

<h3> </h3>
I’d like to introduce you to the technology we’ve built entirely in-house at
 Audoo over the last few years and give you a flavour of some of the technology choices our team has made along the way. We’ll be following up in the future with more detail on various aspects of how we do things - design, security and privacy, automated testing and some specialised projects and partnerships.

 
 
<h3>Platform</h3>

The cloud platform is centre of everything we do at here Audoo, securely gathering data from our Audio Meters to identify tracks being played, capturing analytics and metrics to ensure operational health, aggregating world-first data for reports and delivery to partners through dashboards and file transfer.
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/c5bbde2b2b144e8c9912857238af20b8.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">

The platform itself is hosted with&nbsp;<a href="https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Amazon Web Services (AWS)</a> and has been built with <a href="https://clojure.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Clojure</a>. We love Clojure as it’s quick and enjoyable to get work done, produces efficient code and is great for working with and transforming data. The platform has been designed using the <a href="http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">"microservices"</a> architectural approach, meaning we divide the overall platform into smaller parts (a “microservice”), each of which are responsible for a specific area.
 

For example, we have individual microservices for user account management, analytics event capture, identifying fingerprints, Audio Meter health checking and so on. Using this architectural technique works really well for our needs, allowing scaling of areas that need more processing power when needed and rapidly iterating on features separately.
 

The platform has over 25 individual microservices so far, all sharing a common design pattern for monitoring, logging, deployment and the APIs they expose – allowing us to concentrate on the functionality rather than the infrastructure. The microservices are tested in isolation as part of our <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_delivery" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Continuous Delivery</a> process to ensure quality before deployment, then also as part of regular platform tests that drive alerts in Slack and our status page that we host publicly at <a href="https://status.audoo.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">https://status.audoo.com/</a>
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/63dfb61e29cd4d9fb2df875e23ec6060.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
<h2> </h2>
<h3>Audio Meters</h3>

The public face of our technology is of course our Audio Meter™, which has been many years in the making. We’ve had dozens of iterations on the external housing and the internal circuit board to get to the reliable, manufacturable, sleek and easy-to-install version that we now manufacture here in the UK.
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/4df5d35903ae4c889e3dec763f42424e.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
 
An early prototype circuit board that was used to prove the concept can be seen below, measuring over 30cm2, with microphones sticking out on the edges. The team worked long and hard with external specialists to get to the multi-layer board, of which we have now built thousands&nbsp;measuring approx. 10cm2 x 4.5cm2 with the microphones directly on the board.

<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/1d7baccb256941b5a2e8be1f95c11ab2.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
We’ll come back to our manufacturing process in a future post – covering the testing we put every board through as it’s built and assembled into the finished Audio Meter. We love data and visibility of it, so we have real-time test results from our factory on an internal manufacturing dashboard where we can see boards at each test stage and the detailed test results as the factory run through the process. Below you can see a board that has failed on the second testing stage as well as an example of the detail captured in the audio test stage.
 

<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/e05856d908874d5ba9008417f4467f5b.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/16e96d88ed4d40b98bf483b052fad325.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
 
The embedded software that controls the Audio Meter is developed in a combination of Python, C and C++. The design goals for the software are to ensure reliability, privacy, security, simplicity and robustness, all while using as little power as possible – in fact, our Audio Meters consume less power than a standard USB phone charger. Our aim is for the Audio Meter to be plugged in and for it to “just work”… we have cellular connectivity&nbsp;inside, so as soon as it has power we can connect to our cloud platform and get recognising.
 

Operating in the opposite way to smart speakers (that need to isolate and recognise voice commands that are spoken), we want to remove speech and noise from the audio to isolate the music being played. As part of this audio processing, we run a machine learning model on the Audio Meter to give a probability score on whether music is playing or not, capture sound levels and other metrics. The audio from microphones is never stored on the Audio Meter, nor is it sent to our cloud platform.&nbsp;We instead generate and send an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_fingerprint" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">“acoustic fingerprint”</a> to our cloud to match and identify the music that is playing - this ensures privacy for the venues we are installed in. As part of our reliably efforts – for example, working around occasionally poor reception – Audio Meters are capable of offline fingerprinting, where they store the fingerprints securely to retry until we know they have been received by our cloud platform. In a future post, we’ll go into detail on the automated testing and checks we carry out when releasing software updates for the Audio Meters around the world.
 
<h3>Dashboards and Apps</h3>
 
You will have seen a few screenshots of our internal web dashboard in this blog - we use this tool to manage venues and installations, provide support, diagnose and fix problems, manage catalogue metadata, get ad-hoc reports / insights and so much more. We use <a href="https://ionicframework.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Ionic</a> that allows the same codebase to be used to also provide a mobile app that is used by installation partners. We’re immensely proud of our internal tooling and always get great feedback when demoing to partners and investors. Last year we also&nbsp;launched&nbsp;an externally accessible <a href="https://audoo.com/technology/dashboard" target="_blank">dashboard</a> for partners to use, which allows users to dive into reports and real-world data insights from all over the globe.
 
Our design process is lightweight but effective – moving from understanding the product requirements to wireframes, to hi-fidelity click-through demos in <a href="https://www.figma.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Figma</a>. Once the team has agreed the flow, our cloud and data team work on APIs that are marked up as comments on the design in parallel with the UI build-out.
 
<img src="https://assets.audoo.com/content/image/cfe86f8ebaa8469388d3cf1e91651a62.webp" style="margin: 0px auto; display: block;">
<h2> </h2>
<h3>Reporting and Data</h3>
 
As our central product is reporting the music played to our partners, naturally a huge part of our platform centres around processing the millions of analytics events we receive every day to build out the reports. We make use of several AWS services to drive this - central to this is a <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/redshift/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Redshift</a> data warehouse, with a <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/kinesis/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Kinesis</a> stream providing real-time on data, then <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/step-functions/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Step Functions</a>, <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/emr/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Elastic Map Reduce</a> and loading / reporting code to process batch runs overnight. As catalogue data is constantly updated and improved, during report delivery, we take a “snapshot” copy of the data being delivered to ensure analytics dashboards are based on the same data delivered to partners. We load and transform data to enable our dashboard insight use cases through a Postgres caching database to give the performance we need for these views.
<h2> </h2>
<h3>Summary</h3>
 
I’m incredibly proud of the team and what we’ve built at Audoo over the last few years – taking <a href="https://audoo.com/about/our-story" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank" style="color: rgb(70, 120, 134);">Ryan’s vision</a> from a proof of concept to a super reliable product that we’re rolling out around the world.
 
I hope you enjoyed this introduction to what we’ve built and look out for more detailed follow up posts coming soon!
 
Cheers,
 
 Steve

Steve Robbins CTO

I’d like to introduce you to the technology we’ve built entirely in-house at
Audoo over the last few years here at Audoo and give you a flavour of some of the technology choices our team has made along the way. We’ll be following up in the future with more detail on various aspects of how we do things - design, security and privacy, automated testing and some specialised projects and partnerships.

Blog

Press contact: audoo@wordsandpixels.co

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