SUCCESS STORY: SENTRIC MUSIC

17th July 2022

Over 300,000 songwriters and catalogue owners worldwide trust Sentric.

The innovative company has gained this trust by delivering on their guarantee to provide clients with a publishing deal that collects more royalties, in more music markets than any other set up.

This year, the company announced that it has been bought by Swiss music fintech business Utopia Music. Utopia will now set up a new engineering hub in Liverpool City Region, leading to significant job creation.

Here, Sentric Music Group founder and CEO, Chris Meehan tells Invest Liverpool how Liverpool City Region shaped his company’s success from the very start.

The story of how Sentric got to this position is a fascinating one and is a great example of how you can build a £32 million music business in Liverpool.  The idea for Sentric came to Chris when he was on a placement as part of his degree at Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA).

The birth of the business came from Chris’s desire to solve a long-standing music-publishing problem. This area was a space that very few people knew about or understood and musicians and songwriters didn’t have easy access to securing publishing rights, as a result lost money.

Sentric Music was set up to demystify publishing and enable songwriters to collect money globally in an easy and friendly way. It turned the publishing model on its head by presenting publishing as a service rather than as something  based on the traditional ownership model, where  a publisher will ‘own’ the song for a fixed period.

Chris Meehan, said: “Sentric made it easy for songwriters to get the money they were entitled to and didn’t tie them down for any longer than a rolling, 28-day period so they were free to take their songs elsewhere if they thought they could get a better deal. Through our tech solution we develop and own collected publishing monies owed to their artists with a split 80:20 in the artist’s favour.”

“It sounds obvious but I’ve always felt the key things are to look at what problem you are trying to solve and then figure out how you are going to make money from it.”

From their offices in Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle – The city region’s burgeoning  creative district – Sentric currently administer almost 4 million songs (which they can manage due to their innovative tech) and also offer sync services which can generate extra income for songwriters.

Chris is a passionate advocate of Liverpool City Region as a great place to live and a great place to do business. He is a member of the Liverpool City Region Music Board and feels that the city region has an innate creative spark and distinctive entrepreneurial spirit that is essential for success in the creative industries.

“Liverpool has huge strengths as a music sector. I think we should shout about it more and market the city as a music business hub in the same way that Nashville is.  People always think of the strengths we have on the live side of the industry but we also have real strengths with record labels, publishers, production and everything else.

“Just look at companies like ourselves, Ditto, Modern Sky and Ad Lib.  We should be telling people that they can come here as a student – we have some great music and music industry courses here. You can have a great student life in Liverpool and then you can stay here and get an exciting job in a music business or be supported to set up your own.

“When people visit from our other offices – be it London, Spain, LA, New York, and Hamburg, they love spending a week or a month in Liverpool. Lauren, our Head of Legal, was originally from Liverpool and she left her job at Vevo in London because we were able to offer her a senior job in the music industry, but based here rather than in London. As we grow, we can do more of that. People love the lifestyle and quality of life here.”

Chris is regularly booked as a speaker at music industry B2B event, across many platforms and his message is always clear: you can grow an important music business in Liverpool City Region and you and your team can have a great time here while you are doing it.

As a passionate advocate for Liverpool City Region, Chris has always been determined that Sentric would stay in Liverpool and the latest exciting Utopia news hasn’t changed that.  In closing, Chris added:

“We always said that if we ever got to publish Journey (Chris’ favourite band) or have one of our songs played on Neighbours we would retire. But then we did both of them and decided we may as well just carry on anyway.”

Visit sentricmusic.com

17th July 2022