UTOPIA MUSIC ACQUIRES QUINCY JONES-BACKED EMOTIONAL ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE COMPANY, MUSIMAP
Acquisition will accelerate global expansion for both firms and aid the development of new products
Utopia Music has acquired industry-leading emotional data enrichment company, Musimap. The acquisition, which brings Utopia’s workforce to nearly 150 employees, will strengthen Utopia in building the next-generation infrastructure that will advance creator rights and enable new opportunities for the recordings business.
Adding Musimap’s artificial intelligence technology and metadata expertise will help create a gold standard for advanced metadata tagging and enrichment – connecting the right song to the right audience at the right time. Further, the acquisition enhances Utopia’s strong offering for independent and major labels and creators.
Musimap, backed by legendary producer Quincy Jones, is known for its leading automated engines that power music discovery, emotional profiling and metadata enrichment.
The firm’s APIs utilise proprietary intelligence to generate unique emotional metadata for clients. This can be used to search for similar songs, automatically create playlists based on certain genres, moods, etc., and match playlists with personality profiles.
Musimap currently offers three core products — MusiMatch, MusiMotion and MusiMe — with clients including Universal Music Group, Vevo, Warner Music Group, BMG and many more high-profile stakeholders in the global music space.
The acquisition will enable Musimap products to be offered in new territories within Utopia’s portfolio. With Utopia technology, Musimap products will also gain competitive advantage, strength and optimised market positioning in the rapidly growing music technology market for enabling creator rights.
Musimap, in turn, expands Utopia’s family to now include Belgium, central Europe and Canada; widening the companies’ combined global reach and market access, and complementing Utopia’s existing industry footprint.
Utopia Chairman of the board, Mattias Hjelmstedt, said: “The acquisition of Musimap represents yet another milestone on our journey of becoming the world’s preferred technology supporting the entire music industry by creating new revenue streams, consolidating data and reducing administration while offering a broad spectrum of diverse, yet deeply innovative services across the globe. This is a key enabler in making the world a better place for creators through Fair Pay For Every Play.”
Andreas Spechtler, Executive Chairman of the board of Musimap, added: “Musimap’s AI technology and the team’s experience in music and emotional data is truly unique and recognised by customers like Warner Music and supported by music icons like Quincy Jones. The uniqueness of Musimap is reflected not only in this acquisition, but also in existing collaborations with DSPs, artists, labels, advertising agencies and voice-controlled speaker manufacturers.
“With the acquisition by Utopia Music, Musimap’s technology will become a global standard for emotional AI in music that will supercharge the global music industry. The Musimap team is proud to become a key component of the growth and success story of the Utopia Music family.”
Commented Quincy Jones, record producer and investor in Musimap: “Musimap’s technology is the FUTURE and it makes my soul smile to see it become the AI backbone of another tech giant. Teaming up with Utopia will undoubtedly unlock new doors for Musimap, and allow it to continue changing the way we consume music, and empower creators, through enhanced discoverability. From the looks of my personality profile, as provided by MusiMe, I can tell this machine has sharpened its left brain!! Big-time props to the team and I look forward to continuing in the exploration of music through emotions together.”
Musimap will continue to service its existing customers as a part of the Utopia family of businesses, as it moves towards its goal of tagging 80% of the global music catalogue with emotionally enriched metadata over the next few years.
Utopia’s purpose is to deliver Fair Pay for Every Play through its service and platform offering. Its strategy is fueled by joining forces with winners in the music and technology space.
About Utopia Music
Utopia Music, founded in 2016 in Switzerland, is building a new music ecosystem that will help the entire music industry by creating new revenue streams, consolidating data and drastically reducing the restrictive administrative overhead limitations created by antiquated systems, freeing up available revenue for creative processes and creator development.
For more information about Utopia, please visit http://utopiamusic.com
About Musimap
Musimap was founded in 2015 in Belgium by Senior Musicologist Pierre Lebecque, CTO Frédéric Notet and former CEO Vincent Favrat and is now at 17 employees. Musimap is considered the leading emotional Artificial Intelligence company, leveraging 20 years of manual tagging efforts. With years of research expertise, audio- processing and AI, Musimap owns one of the largest annotated music databases in the world. It counts legendary record producer Quincy Jones as special advisor and investor, alongside Andreas Spechtler, former President of Dolby International and CEO of Silicon Castles.
For more information about Musimap, please visit http://musimap.net