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.
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 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
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 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.
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.
The Release team helped us to turn our ideas into reality. Their combination of deep industry knowledge with functional, analytical and technical skills was key to the success of the project, as was their ability to integrate and work with the in-house team.
Working with Faraz has been a pleasure. It’s rare to find someone who can so fluently speak both the language of IT systems people and that of the business. Faraz has without a doubt made the difference between success and failure on this project.