Digimarc Revolutionizes Audio Content Authentication & Protection with Next-Generation Digital Watermarking

BEAVERTON, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC), the global leader in digital watermarking, today announced the launch of its next-generation audio watermarking technology. Designed to tackle the most urgent challenges in today’s dynamic audio ecosystems, this breakthrough solution helps ensure accurate compensation for creators, provides robust authorship verification, and enables best-in-class protection for sensitive content in the era of generative AI.

“The explosion of digital and AI-generated audio has created unprecedented challenges for rights holders, content creators, companies, and governments,” said Riley McCormack, CEO of Digimarc. “Our next-generation audio watermarking technology stands out by delivering the crucial tools these entities require to confront these pressing challenges. It enables precise royalty tracking to protect revenue, robust authorship verification to safeguard both human and AI-generated content from misuse, and best-in-class security and robustness to deter insider threats and safeguard sensitive data. These solutions are engineered for the real world: they secure at scale, preserve audio quality, and perform reliably across diverse platforms and even in the noisiest environments. This is how we help creators, artists, distributors, companies, and governments authenticate and protect their valuable digital assets.”

Digimarc’s new audio watermarking technology delivers powerful benefits to multiple industries:

• Precise royalty tracking and usage reporting: Unmatched accuracy in tracking audio content across TV, radio, and streaming services enables artists, labels, and distributors to maximize revenue through precise royalty payments and transparent usage insights, ensuring their financial interests are protected.
• Robust authorship verification: As generative AI fuels a surge in synthetic audio, Digimarc’s audio watermarking safeguards both human-created and AI-generated content—from music and podcasts to voice-cloned material—shielding it from misuse, counterfeiting, and unauthorized distribution.
• Leak detection: To combat the risk of confidential information being leaked and distributed without permission, Digimarc’s next-generation audio watermarks can be deployed to ensure organizations and governments can trace the source and take appropriate action, effectively deterring insider threats and safeguarding sensitive data.

Built on decades of digital watermarking expertise, Digimarc’s latest innovations set a new standard for audio watermarking performance and reliability. Key capabilities include:

• Reliable detection in clips as short as one second
• Truly inaudible digital identities, preserving audio fidelity
• Consistent performance in noisy, compressed, or degraded environments
• End-to-end resilience through voiceovers, remixes, and transcoding workflows

Every year, billions of dollars in audio royalties go unpaid due to stripped metadata, failed fingerprinting in short or noisy clips, and the inefficiencies of manual royalty tracking systems. Digimarc’s technology directly addresses this multi-billion-dollar gap with a scalable, reliable solution that empowers broadcasters, streaming platforms, rights management organizations, and artists to protect their assets and revenues. Additionally, Digimarc’s audio watermarks can be used for robust authorship verification across diverse content, including voice, music, podcasts, and audiobooks, as well as in broadcast, streaming, advertising, and dubbing applications, supporting industry efforts to promote trust and accountability.

Brent Phillips, Chief Technology Officer at SourceAudio, stated, “we consider Digimarc technology best-in-class and vital to our business growth. The previous Digimarc audio watermark technology literally unlocked an entirely new vertical for us, and we cannot wait to see how far we can take the new tech. Managing audio rights across diverse platforms and formats demands solutions that can keep up with the speed, scale, and complexity of modern distribution. Digimarc’s audio watermarking is completely inaudible. It has passed every "golden ears" test we've thrown at it, yet it is reliably detectable in clips as short as one second—even after compression, remixing, or voiceovers. With Digimarc’s watermarks being both inaudible and detectable in such short clips, they outperform other watermarking and fingerprinting technologies, which require longer audio segments for accurate identification.”

To learn more about how Digimarc is transforming audio authentication and rights protection, visit https://www.digimarc.com/products/audio-authentication

About Digimarc

Digimarc Corporation (NASDAQ: DMRC) is the pioneer and global leader in digital watermarking technologies. For nearly 30 years, Digimarc innovations and intellectual property in digital watermarking have been deployed at a massive scale for the identification and the authentication of physical and digital items. A notable example is our partnership with a consortium of the world’s central banks to deter counterfeiting of global currency. Digimarc is also instrumental in supporting global industry standards efforts spanning both the physical and digital worlds. In 2023, Digimarc was named to the Fortune 2023 Change the World list and honored as a 2023 Fast Company World Changing Ideas finalist. Learn more at Digimarc.com.