7Digital AIM:7DIG, the London-based B2B digital music group, has signed a contract with Utopia Music AG, a B2B music fintech company.
7Digital, founded in 2004, provides access to music and radio stations, offering B2B services for digital music partners as well as branded direct-to-consumer music downloads. Their scalable digital music platform and flexible APIs are used to power comprehensive music and radio services for leading consumer brands, mobile carriers, hardware manufacturers, and broadcasters — among them Samsung, BBC, McDonald’s, and Yahoo.
The company’s global catalogue includes more than 27 million tracks and the platform allows consumers to buy music from a digital store and branded mobile apps, and is pre-installed on more than 60 million devices worldwide. The platform provides metadata including identification of music and artists, monitoring broadcasts, and monitoring copyrighted material.
Pay-out
Utopia is a new customer for 7Digital and the company builds technology and data accounting to improve the way the music industry pays royalties to the creators for the music copyrights consumption. Using 7digital’s global music database capabilities, in addition to Utopia’s existing data capabilities, Utopia’s customers will be able to monitor and measure the consumption of their music copyrights globally. In so doing, Utopia’s customers can leverage data for faster, more accurate pay-outs of royalties to copyright holders.
Paul Langworthy, chief executive officer of 7digital, said: “Combining Utopia’s next-gen tracking and pay-outs technology with 7digital’s leading catalogue and metadata will enable music recognition for up to 100 million songs worldwide and support the whole industry to make more money faster, with fewer costs.”
Festivals
The Utopia deal comes hot on the heels of a similar partnership with social-media app Lomotif, signed earlier in July. The two-year agreement will see Lomotif using 7digital’s platform to stream licensed music and clips from major label licensors, including new labels that it signs deals with. Lomotif will also be tapping 7digital’s back-end reporting tools for labels and publishers.
7Digital will also gain access to the live-stream festival segment with Lomotif attracting 7.2 million in-app viewers to its Okeechobee Music and Arts Festival stream in March 2022.
Langworthy said regarding the new Utopia deal: “We are also pleased to have secured another contract that enables growth and scales as our customer’s business needs do. This contract, in addition to those signed so far this year, means that [7Digital] has already secured a 36% increase in platform licensing for 2022 vs 2021.”
7Digital opened trading on AIM on 25th July at 24p and had risen to 31p by mid-morning. Shares in the digital media company ranged from 14p to GBP1 over the past 52-weeks, offering a year-to-date return of -40.2% and a one-year return of -66.47%. The company has a market capitalisation of GBP6.12m.
