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Bloomberg
A Swiss-Swedish startup wants to bring the power of big data and social-media analysis to the music business, offering artists instant insight into where and how their songs are playing so they can market more effectively to fans.
Utopia Music Group is being billed as a new kind of record company by its founder, Mattias Hjelmstedt. Like an old-school label, Utopia Music will also produce and book live performances and handle artist logistics, such as flights, cabs and hotel rooms.
But the company claims to offer more — artificial-intelligence software that sifts through data gathered from sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Augmented with the information coming from YouTube, radio playlists and music-streaming services, it spits out insights that pinpoint, for example, where musicians’s fastest-growing audiences are. The intel can be used to boost income with better decisions about marketing campaigns, live concerts and promotions.
“Today the music world is so digital that you can essentially see the result of marketing seconds later,†Hjelmstedt said in a phone interview ahead of this week’s Winter Music Conference in Miami.