German music publisher and record label BMG is migrating its royalty processing infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform.
The Berlin-based music publisher and record label has selected GCP as its digital music business grows and its royalty processing requirements increase in volume and complexity.
As part of its infrastructure migration, BMG is shifting 1,500 components, servers, and databases to the cloud.
“BMG is at its heart a service company for artists and songwriters, and we are constantly optimizing our business to improve that service and deliver it more efficiently. With the move to Google Cloud, we can now tap into relevant data across the music lifecycle with smarter analytics tools, to benefit our artist and songwriter clients,” said Gaurav Mittal, Vice President, Group Technology, BMG.
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Rise in streaming results in rise in royalty payment complexity
With physical sales declining and streaming on the rise, the volume of data that BMG now manages has grown exponentially, meaning the company must process billions of lines of income and process payments to artists, songwriters and other rights holders. The company - which features Kylie Minogue, The Rolling Stones, Iggy Pop, and Lenny Kravitz in its catalog - says streaming can results in up to 2,000 times as many transactions as physical album sales.
BMG will utilize GCP's BigQuery serverless enterprise data warehouse and open source data and analytics processing solution Dataproc to scale its royalty processing as required. The company says this will ensure accurate and timely payment of artist royalties while also reducing overall operating costs. BMG was already a GCP customer and was using the cloud company’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies for marketing and recommendation activities.
“The rise in digital media means that content companies have to place an increasing importance in data and analytics. We're thrilled to work with BMG and are looking forward to collaborating on the innovative ways our data-driven solutions can help the company drive new revenue streams and scale its business,” said Anil Jain, Managing Director, Media & Entertainment, Industry Solutions, Google Cloud.
Bertelsmann, the parent company of BMG, last year launched the Bertelsmann Collaboration Platform, on which its companies can exchange information about newly developed IT solutions, tools, algorithms, applications, and software programs worldwide.
It owns a majority stake in Data Center Europe S.a r.L., Luxemburg. Arvato, a company in the Bertelsmann portfolio which offers cloud services, operates its own data centers in the US, China, and Germany, and also utilizes Microsoft Azure.
