Utopia Music (Utopia Music AG) continues to be one of the most talked about and acquisitive startups in the modern music business – though not everyone, as yet, has fully got their head around exactly what it’s building.
The Switzerland-headquartered company’s oft-repeated slogan is “fair pay for every play”, while it bills itself “a Swiss Music fintech company leveling up the music industry through clear, transparent, and reliable data-based solutions”.
Outside of its recent flurry of acquisitions, that claim appears to center upon Utopia’s proprietary music monitoring platform, sometimes referenced as the ‘Utopia Open Platform’ (UOP).
UOP makes a log whenever tracks are spun/played on radio stations and other broadcasters around the world, as well as identifying plays on streaming platforms and ingesting track/song metadata.
Industry sources suggest that Utopia is aiming to build such a comprehensive music data-ingesting machine that PROs and major music companies will have no choice but to adopt/license the platform for their own data processing in the future.
Such an outcome – depending on the licensing model – could potentially see Utopia receive a small payment from near-enough every music transaction globally.
Some remain unconvinced by that possibility. “It’s one thing to tell PROs that you have better data than them and even that your platform can eradicate the ‘black box’,” said one music publishing veteran. “It’s quite another matter to think you can convince them all to unilaterally sign up to your platform, and to change their payouts.”
Others are more positive. “The PROs showed they can’t be trusted to build a Global Repertoire Database themselves a few years ago, when their joint project completely imploded,” said one senior industry source.
“The modern music business demands the transparency of one trusted source of global data. If that ends up being built by a startup in Switzerland, so be…
