Spanish Point Technologies

Customer Stories /

The Matching Engine

Sector:
The Music Industry

Client Since:
2012

Main Services:
Music Copyright Solutions

Technologies Used:
Azure Search, and Azure Databricks

In an era of online streaming and the increase in data volume, Copyright Management Organizations (CMOs) are struggling to keep up. A new appproach is needed to deal with the ever increase in data volumes, in order to efficiently pay song writers and artists.

Spanish Point Technologies’ Matching Engine is a SaaS solution that is helping CMOs cope with large data volumes. It helps identify songs of performance records consumed on digital platforms, so CMOs can achieve better results in the distribution of royalties when compared to existing systems.

“Since joining SoundExchange and working with CMRRA I have been impressed with the breadth and sophistication of CMRRA’s system and their forward approach in leveraging modern technologies to solve integration, automation and data volume challenges. Their technical partner, Spanish Point, has demonstrated great industry knoweldge and technical expertise.”

Aaron Partington,

PRODUCT & PROJECT MANAGER, SOUND EXCHANGE

The Challenge

In the past, broadcast data was easily managed by using traditional database systems to help the music industry identify the amount of license income that should have been paid to song writers and music publishers. Today, the exponential growth of digital streaming services has increased the number of transactions and created new challenges and severe disruption to the business model in the Music & Copyright industry.

The challenge in terms of processing royalties in a timely effective way, was to allow organizations to match works, produce invoices and distribute at a cost of processing appropriate to the income. With streaming, now the dominant means by which people consume music, and the legacy system CMOs use are struggling with the volume of metadata.

To cope with the increased number of transactions per month, as well as the revenue per transaction, many CMOs have had to move from SQL Server to a Software as a Service solutions (SaaS) in order to optimize the recent explosion in data volumes associated with streaming services such as Spotify or YouTube.

The Solution

As the music market has changed, CMOs found a need for software developers and system architects with expertise and with an understanding of the complex metadata associated with the music industry. CMOs reached out to Spanish Point Technologies and their engineers to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies.

With over a 10-year track record of building IT solutions for the music industry, Spanish Point Technologies has been on a transitional journey with several CMOs into the new world of digital streaming.
The company has introduced a cloud based platform, the Matching Engine, that has been a game changer in managing the volumes associated with streaming data.

The Matching Engine solution is a more modern and adaptable system, less expensive to maintain, and highly scalable. It is a SaaS solution that runs in the cloud helping CMOs, publishers and similar organizations to handle the exponential growth of data volumes in the music industry. The high-performance engine of the Matching Engine supports organisations addressing metadata errors and ensure music royalties are tracked with accuracy.

The company favours an agile approach to software development, ensuring customers like CMOs are involved and informed every step of the way; keeping the customer experience front of mind in order to create bespoke solutions that are both user-friendly and innovative.
Spanish Point began developing the Matching Engine solution in February, 2012, choosing only Microsoft Azure based components such as Azure Search, Azure Databricks and Spark to configure a sophisticated cloud based platform that helps CMOs deal with their metadata issues while adapting to the new era of online streaming.

Key Benefits

Automated Scaling

Ensures that song writers and artists receive payments they deserve

Increased flexibility for music publisher clients

Identifies large numbers of performance records consumed in digital platforms and matches them to existing CMO repertoires.

Agile Approach

Using cloud-based technologies the Matching Engine is able to use automated scaling to process the data in a fraction of the time that it would have taken previously.

The Matching Engine which also uses machine learning and advanced algorithms to accelerate data processing, has lowered transaction processing times from 12 hours to 5 minutes.

The constant innovation and improvements in the Matching Engine are design, methodologies and software development tasks, but Spanish Point’s ability to bring together different teams of engineers to identify potential innovations through an agile approach and technical intensity is what defines Spanish Point’s mindset and has helped to develop the Matching Engine. The Matching Engine ensures that song writers and artists receive the payments they deserve by helping CMOs to identify the large number of performance records consumed in digital platforms and matching them to existing CMO repertoires.