Warner Music Group is one of the “Big Three” entertainment and record label conglomerates, known worldwide for owning some of the best-known record labels in the industry. With operations in more than 50 countries globally, Warner Music Group is home to world-famous artists and has a catalog of more than one million copyrights.
CHALLENGE
The face of the music industry has changed: instead of relying on album sales alone, record labels and entertainment companies receive data on artist performance and song downloads from more than one hundred different streaming media companies like Spotify, Pandora, and iTunes. Entertainment companies must be able to ingest this data and integrate it into their systems in order to judge artist performance and distribute royalty payments.
As a result, Warner Music Group had to process files sent from 150 different streaming media companies, apply structures to them, and send that data to its various platforms. With its legacy systems, each new data source took three months to process, which would have added up to more than 35 years of processing work for all the streaming platforms combined. With their legacy systems, Warner Music Group could not distribute royalty payments to their artists in a timely manner.
Warner Music Group needed to replace its on-prem Hadoop, Parexcel, Cassandra, and Tableau stack in order to process artist performance faster, so they turned to Caserta for our deep technology and domain expertise.
SOLUTION
At the beginning of the engagement, Warner Music Group was in the process of re-architecting their core business platform, replacing their legacy applications with an integrated framework based on open source, big data technologies. However, they were facing difficulties with scalability.
We recommended and implemented strategic cloud architecture along with methods and tools for governing data from the lake to the EDW. Using AWS S3 and Redshift, we created a system that can stream all the data files from the 150 data sources directly into Hadoop and process the information in seconds.
We left almost all data needs completely on the S3 cloud, reporting the feed into SAP to perform artist royalty payments.
BUSINESS OUTCOME
With Caserta’s solution, Warner Music Group is now able to process the data from streaming companies in seconds not months, providing them with real-time information on trending artists across each streaming media platform and giving them the ability to prepare artist royalty payments almost instantly.
In addition, Warner Music Group’s new system is truly scalable. For example, if there is an influx of data from a viral song, the system will scale up to handle the increased volume of downloads and then scale back down as downloads taper, maintaining the performance of the system as a whole.
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