In less than a year Kobalt STIM Aggregated Rights AB, the partnership between Kobalt Music Group (Kobalt) and STIM, has concluded agreements with all major music companies including iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, Google, Amazon, Napster and Vevo. In March 2013 STIM and Kobalt launched a new one-stop European licensing solution for multi-territorial digital music service providers. The partnership has since demonstrated it can implement licensing faster in digital markets than any other licensing service, having already signed deals with a majority of the European online music market.
Through a simple licence, major digital music services that have signed an agreement have received Europe-wide online rights for Kobalt’s entire repertoire of over 300,000 songs including some of the most popular hits across Europe.”It’s fantastic that the business model we launched together with Kobalt has resulted in so many important agreements and also in record time. It’s a big step on the way towards a common European market for music rights and STIM’s aim is to be a key player on the market,” says Kenth Muldin, CEO of STIM.”Through our one-stop digital licensing service and our unique shared technology platform, we are very pleased to be able to quickly satisfy the market need while uniquely giving our clients transparency and significantly accelerated access to their money,” said Willard Ahdritz, Founder and CEO of Kobalt.”I am very pleased with the speed and ease of which the Kobalt STIM partnership has executed the licensing process to enable quick delivery of our music to digital services and to the benefit of the market and consumers. The speed and efficiency sets a new standard which benefits the DSP’s and the industry as a whole,” added Tomas Ericsson, Kobalt President of Society Relations.