Photo Credit: Utopia Music
Just one year after acquiring free-to-use music industry directory ROSTR, Utopia Music has sold it back to the company’s original founders.
During 2021 and 2022, Swiss Fintech company Utopia Music grew significantly via several back-to-back acquisitions, including music-centric finance platform Lyric Financial, data analytics platform ForTunes, music distributor Proper Music, artist services business Absolute, and music publisher and royalty admin service Sentric Music. During this acquisition spree, Utopia had also acquired ROSTR — a California-based, free-to-use music industry directory and data platform — in December 2021 ‘to strengthen its direct offering towards creators.’
Following Utopia’s recent downsizing and executive rejig, it has sold ROSTR back to its founders and says it’s ‘now focusing on serving creators through third parties via its B2B offerings.’
Speaking about Utopia and ROSTR’s new paths, Mattias Hjelmstedt, Executive Chairman and Founder of Utopia Music, said, ‘Utopia and ROSTR came together with a shared mission of making a better world for music, although we’ll be pursuing this mission on separate paths, we know ROSTR is an invaluable resource for the music industry.’
Photo Credit: ROSTR
ROSTR is now an independent company owned by founders Mark Williamson and Adam Watson, both former Spotify Execs.
Mark Williamson, CEO and Cofounder of ROSTR, spoke about the reacquisition, saying, “When we were given the opportunity to reacquire ROSTR, we had to take it; we have unfinished business helping to build a more connected entertainment industry.”
The company maps the largest database of artist teams, including hundreds of thousands of relationships between artists, managers, agents, labels, and publishers.
Utopia is directing its focus on new horizons with strategic reorganization into two divisions, Music Services and Royalty Platform.
Utopia’s Royalty Platform is dedicated to building and scaling financial infrastructure and services for the music industry. This newly-minted focus of Utopia aims to enable accurate and efficient capture and processing of royalties.
“Our Utopian vision is that the music industry can fully monetize the use of music in all its forms and continue to grow as a result,’ said Hjelmstedt. ‘We’re working hard to make this a reality by focusing our efforts on building financial infrastructure and B2B services for the music industry to process and pay out royalties quickly and accurately.”