June 4, 2020

Music streaming data volumes continue to rise, creating data challenges for CMOs. On the 12th of May, we held a webinar sharing the benefits of the Matching Engine and how the cloud can provide both operational and cost efficiencies

In 2019 global music revenues reached $20.2bn. As streaming is a large share of this revenue, this translates into massive amounts of data to be processed by CMOs. Artists are the heart of this industry and while streaming has allowed them to reach new audiences, at the same time their revenues have reduced. Streaming transactions are now worth a fraction of a cent. As music streaming revenues achieve record levels, the data volume is huge and continues to grow. A typical file from Spotify could include billions of transactions. Music rights organisations are searching for cost effective ways to tackle the challenges posed by big data. Cloud technology is providing these CMOs with scalability and high performance without the high resources associated with on-premise technology.

In our recent webinar, Spanish Point Technologies’ CEO Donal Cullen shared how the music rights organisations can benefit from a cloud infrastructure. Combining our 10+ years building solutions for CMOs with our Azure expertise, we developed an application that addresses many of the issues posed by modern music matching.  The Matching Engine is a 100% cloud native application. Built in Azure it is a highly scalable and high performing application created bespoke for the music industry. In the webinar Donal shared some key features and benefits of the Matching Engine:

Remove the costs and inflexibility associated with on-premise servers

There are many overheads associated with the running of on-premise servers. The Matching Engine provides CMOs with scalable cloud databases, providing flexibility. In addition, the cloud service provider takes over much of the workload that would be previously internal, such as backup and disaster recovery.

Rather than build from scratch, leverage Azure features and applications

As a 100% Azure built application, the Matching Engine can leverage innovative Azure features and services. Azure Search is used to search and index data, while Azure Databricks allows for large file ingestion. Also, CMOs will be able to take advantage of the various performance management features available.

Transactional data is ingested and matched quickly and accurately.

With huge volumes of varied and inconsistent transactional data from a plethora of sources, on-premise and legacy systems struggle to cope. However efficient ingestion and accurate matching are vital to pay artists. The Matching Engine uses Azure Databricks to make ingestion of large volumes of data to unstructured databases. Donal shared that some CMOs report a 60X improvement in ingestion speeds.

Scale up and down cloud resources as required

As music revenues continue to grow, there are more pressures put on systems. The Matching Engine can autoscale to meet demand. When required additional services can be provisioned, then scaled down again once complete. CMOs have total control over this process, ensuring that total costs are managed.

The Matching Engine is built to address the universal issues faced by CMOs. As Donal shared in the webinar, while there are initial costs of moving to the cloud, in the long term CMOs will see the financial benefits. Also, music revenues for your members and artists will be more accurately matched and thus fairly paid. The Matching Engine can be implemented incrementally to minimize disruptions. If you are interested in learning more about the Matching Engine please reach out to our Music team.