Artist Portal: digital analytics dashboard
The client's brief
Universal Music Group understood that the disruptive potential of data generated
by digital music consumption and listener activity on social networks was an opportunity to shape and
focus both their marketing campaigns and their overall strategies in the digital world. In order to foster
this new data-centric way of working, Universal needed compelling tools and easy-to-understand visualizations
of complex data. They also recognized that their existing platform would be unable to scale to meet the
challenges presented by these volumes of data. Release's blend of industry and technical expertise
made us the ideal partner to help them meet this challenge.
Our work
Release were asked to architect and build a business intelligence application
from scratch – including:
1. Integration of many different data sources
2. Structuring of data to enable slicing by artist, product, time, territory
and many other dimensions
3. Design of analytical 'cubes', enabling fast querying of huge volumes of data
4. Creation of dashboards to support both casual and expert users, giving easy access to
insights previously only available from complex reports
To deliver business value as early as possible, the project took an Agile/iterative approach,
with new functionality released every 2-4 weeks.
The result
The application was rolled out worldwide, enabling users at all
levels of the organization to have information on performance and trends at their fingertips. When launched, the application
managed over 7 billion rows of data, proving that scale and performance can be combined.
This innovative project was also featured in an article in The Economist and the Wall Street Journal
VEVO
The client's brief
Universal Music Group announced in early 2009 an exciting new joint venture with
a goal to launch VEVO; the number one premium music video streaming service on the internet. The
International Digital Business and Operations teams knew that evaluating, managing and implementing
business and IT changes would be the key to successfully launching VEVO with a catalogue of International videos.
Our work
Our Lead Consultant joined the project team as the subject matter expert
responsible for managing the international aspects of the project. This pivotal role allowed them to
identify business issues early on such as the potential for diluted view counts on YouTube, and then
facilitate IT changes to UMG's Digital Supply Chain which addressed the business needs.
The result
VEVO launched as planned in December 2009 with thousands of Universal Music Group International videos.
The site introduced innovative features like embedded lyrics, and within it's first month became the number
one music video service in the US with over 35 million unique views.