The digitalization of the music industry took everyone by surprise. It marked the beginning of a period of time where the older models that had helped shape the industry began to tumble down. However, more recent advances in technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence, have created new opportunities to mend the industry’s ills. In this article, we present the Utopia Open Platform — a unique tool that will help return financial value to everyone who works to benefit the world of music.

“Technology is going to play a huge part in tomorrow’s music business. And the companies that will win are going to be the most equipped to understand how to use data to further an artist’s career.” — Troy Carter, CEO of Atom Factory

What is the Utopia Open Platform?

For the past couple of years at Utopia, we have been hard at work trying to solve one of the most important issues facing the music industry. From day one, we knew that a revolutionary approach was needed to rebuild the pillars designed and ensure everyone is paid what they deserve.

Despite the recent optimism around increased revenues from digital streaming, live performance and the renaissance of vinyl, the wider music industry is still suffering a decline in revenues from its peak in the late nineties. Given this trend, it is more important than ever to fundamentally restructure the music and entertainment ecosystem so that the underlying revenue and royalty flow — which is the lifeblood of songwriters, performing artist and all rights holders — is built on a foundation of transparency, efficiency, and fairness.

One of the keystones for that change is a truly transparent, data-driven, and centralized music rights database, to ensure both rights holders and licensees are accurately represented and protected.

That is why we have created the Utopia Open Platform — a portal where music rights holders are able to, in real-time, monitor where their music is being played and know what to expect in terms of payout.

The Utopia Open Platform maps out the entire lifecycle of music from the point when a composition is created to the moment when someone listens to a recording. It is designed to be open and flexible, and to provide a robust home for innovation and versatility necessary for continuous evolution of creative, technological, or commercial services. It is built to provide value for all the music industry stakeholders including individual songwriters, individual signed and unsigned performing artists, publishers, record labels, performing rights organisations, distributors, aggregators, content delivery networks, and digital service providers.

What will the Utopia Open Platform do?

The Utopia Open Platform, its data throughout, and all of its built-in components as well as underlying features are designed to address two major issues of the contemporary music industry:

1. Inefficiency and intransparency of the existing global music market

2. Uncollected and unclaimed money

Currently, Utopia is tracking over 100,000 single radio stations worldwide, recording more than 4.5 million new song usages daily, which go for the most part unreported to PROs and thus are never converted into performing royalty payouts to publishers and labels. To date, we have already tracked over 1 billion songs, which gives an indication of the potential value that we can unlock with our service, for all players in the music industry.

Our prime objective is clear; to provide an inclusive ecosystem enabling the music industry to remove existing inefficiencies, while simultaneously unlocking those untracked revenues.

The Utopia Open Platform will fuel streamlined rights management, flexible and customizable payments, increased traffic and insightful user data to drive better business decisions.

Fundamental to this, is the platform’s smart contract powered, blockchain-based architecture, which allows for the automated administration and distribution of royalty payouts.

A simple example would be the hypothetical case of a song initially written by Stevie Wonder, which could be either covered by Adele, played on BBC radio station, viewed on YouTube, mixed by an Ibiza nightclub DJ, or versioned on the main stage at Glastonbury.

In today’s world, it is highly likely that the only person to receive immediate payment would be the DJ, as most live performances are paid upfront; all of the other copyright holders would have to wait months or years to potentially earn any income.

Thanks to the Utopia Open Platform, however, the usage and attribution data would have a safe home in a centralized database and feed itself back to the copyright owners and licensees, triggering the collection of royalties, and paying these back to the artist or rights holder far more quickly than has previously been possible.

What’s more, the Utopia Open Platform will act as the underlying data communication protocol upon which any third-party can build new products and services. We have built a common, interoperable, and trusted data infrastructure that will fuel value creation in the wider ecosystem. Similar to modern day app stores, the Utopia Open Platform will rely on third parties to improve the supply chain with their smart and creative applications.

For the love of music, join us today

We want to be embraced by the music industry, with the ambition to become the new business standard for handling copyrights and consumption data. The Utopia Open Platform can benefit all stakeholders from the very first day they join us. We have developed from the ground up to be as flexible and easy to use as possible, and the Utopia Open Platform will be as simple as joining any other online service with automated systems covering all of the heavy lifting.

When we succeed in our mission, the whole music ecosystem could shift away from a series of inefficient siloed micro-players towards an interconnected network of independent stakeholders, empowered by meaningful data and smart contracts.

We’ve talked a lot about the effect of digitalization on the music industry, for better or for worse, but the digital journey we are about to begin is truly exciting, and far less of a long and winding road.

At Utopia, our pathway is clear. The industry has an unprecedented chance to march with us towards a future where music makers across the world are paid correctly for their craft. To stand still is to err, so we ask you to stride forwards with us today towards an industry that rewards all.

Rock on!