#UTOPIA BAND SERIAL#
#UTOPIA BAND SERIES#

Voddler raised over SEK 200 million in venture capital from the likes of Nokia Growth Partners and Deseven, but following a series of heavy financial losses it tumbled towards bankruptcy in 2018. ( Spotify co-founder Daniel Ek tried Voddler, but famously didn’t rate it.) Voddler, which was originally founded in 2005 and then re-launched in 2008/2009, was a VOD platform that some suggested was Sweden’s answer to Netflix.

#UTOPIA BAND SERIAL#

In Mattias Hjelmstedt, Utopia has one of the more interesting founders currently working in music.īefore launching Utopia in 2016, the serial entrepreneur was, at various points, involved in a professional eSports team (specializing in the video game Counter-Strike), as well as co-founding two notable media streaming startups in Scandinavia: Voddler and Magine. “Utopia makes sense of ALL music data.” Utopia Music: The founder “ Google makes sense of ALL web data,” the deck apparently read. In a 2017 Bloomberg article, Utopia’s Swedish founder, Mattias Hjelmstedt, reportedly likened his startup, at that point, to “a new kind of record company”.īloomberg suggested that Utopia would “produce and book live performances and handle artist logistics, such as flights, cabs and hotel rooms” for talent that signed to its company.Īt the time, Hjelmstedt described Utopia as “a blend of a record label, a publisher and a management company that works with artists to shrink the value chain and use technology to transparently extend their reach”.īy 2019, though, sources tell us that Utopia was sending out investment decks talking up the power of its ‘Utopia Open Platform’, and even comparing itself to one of Big Tech’s biggest names. Interestingly, focusing on building an “agnostic” data engine for the global music industry is not exactly how Utopia began life. If that ends up being built by a startup in Switzerland, so be it.” “The modern music business demands the transparency of one trusted source of global data. “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. “It’s quite another matter to think you can convince them all to unilaterally sign up to your platform, and to change their payouts.” “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.

Some remain unconvinced by that possibility. Such an outcome – depending on the licensing model – could potentially see Utopia receive a small payment from near-enough every music transaction globally. 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. 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. 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). 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”.

Utopia band