7digital inks long-term contract with B2B music fintech

Digital music solutions group 7digital said on Monday that it has inked a long-term contract with business-to-business music fintech company Utopia Music.

7digital said Utopia was a new customer for the company and marked "growing demand" for music data and intelligence services, where its music-as-a-service platform provides access to global audio and track metadata for various use cases.

The AIM-listed group said Utopia will use 7digital's global music database capabilities, in addition to its existing data capabilities, to allow customers to monitor and measure the consumption of their music copyrights globally to ensure more accurate payouts of royalties to copyright holders.

Financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

Chief executive Paul Langworthy said: "It is always exciting to secure a new customer that reflects the competitive strength of our offer. Combining Utopia's next-gen tracking and payouts technology with 7digital's leading catalogue and metadata will enable music recognition for up to 100.0m songs worldwide and support the whole industry to make more money faster, with fewer costs.

"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 the company has already secured a 36% increase in platform licensing for 2022 versus 2021."

As of 1000 BST, 7digital shares had surged 28.89% to 0.29p.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com