Music startup Legitary wins Midemlab competition

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A spin-off of the Vienna University of Technology won this year’s Midemlab, the world’s most important competition for music startups, which served as the basis for companies such as Kickstarter and Soundcloud to become well-known.

Legitary won the first prize in the category "Marketing & Data/Analytics". The company was founded by the mathematician Nermina Mumic. She wants to revolutionize music streaming services and make them fairer. The software is designed to ensure that musicians reliably get fair payment for what they create. The statistician has designed mathematical tools enabling fraud to be discovered with a high degree of reliability. In this way the music industry could become more transparent and fairer.

Legitary exploits the fact that deviations in downloading figures show typical patterns. There are correlations between visitor/access figures on different platforms and certain temporal patterns. If one simply reviews the official figures with the naked eye, it is hardly possible to distinguish between real and manipulated data. However, this is possible on the basis of intelligent statistical methods. In this way Legitary gives musicians a tool in which they can easily and quickly determine whether the official figures are most probably correct and whether an online platform is trying to deceive them in terms of the revenue they deserve to get.