CHALLENGE

The leap into the modern streaming music era has brought with it both new possibilities and unexpected challenges. One such challenge is how to fairly and accurately pay royalties to artists, songwriters, and other music rights holders. Unlike traditional record sales, streaming music has enabled fractional song plays that can complicate the payment algorithm. A fractional song play occurs when someone listens to part of a song, meaning the artist is only owed part of their royalty. With millions of songs available at any given moment and fractional plays becoming more common, the volume of data a music publisher must account for has increased exponentially. Additionally, the landscape of streaming services is constantly shifting, with new platforms emerging and old ones evolving, making it difficult to keep up with the changes. Music publishers and industry professionals continue to contend with this issue as they strive to establish and maintain a fair and sustainable framework for royalty payments in the new digital age. Rytebox’s primary customers, mid-sized music publishers, were becoming overwhelmed by the increasing reporting requirements and the volumes of data being pushed through the pipeline from its Maria and Kafka databases. With performance declining, Rytebox needed a partner that could work in parallel to streamline the reporting process.

THE BARDESS SOLUTION

Rytebox chose Bardess to remediate the data pipeline issues. Bardess was chosen by the client based upon subject matter expertise in the fields of data engineering, reporting and ETL (extract, transform, load), experience in the music publishing field and the ability to scale the workforce as needed. Bardess introduced and implemented StreamSets, a platform for modern data integration, to ingest the data and Databricks, a cloud-based data engineering tool that securely integrates with cloud storage platforms, to create specific SQL engines for each customer. StreamSets enabled Bardess to provide a data pipeline designed for a hybrid environment, thus bringing a mid-sized music publisher data at enterprise scale. DataBricks was able to take advantage of that enterprise pipeline and scale efficiently to handle the necessary volume produced by traditional and streaming music plays. 

VALUE & BENEFITS

Given the new pipeline with StreamSets, DataBricks and Rytebox, reports are now created more than ten times faster than before. Additionally, royalty payments are more accurate and are paid out to clients on time, increasing customer satisfaction. Moreover, these changes removed a barrier to sales and have allowed Rytebox to sign important publishers to use the tool. Finally, Databricks has increased the transparency of royalty status by enabling the artists and writers to connect directly with a SQL client for downstream reporting.

Increased Visibility
for Artists & Writers