Golden Years: Google deal to keep BMG stars shining

Music publishing giant BMG – home to David Bowie, Iggy Pop, the Rolling Stones, Blondie, Fatboy Slim, and Cypress Hill – has turned to Google Cloud to build a scalable, global technology platform to boost its marketing activity, ensure artists get paid on time and forge new revenue streams.

With streaming now accounting for 56% of all sales globally, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2019, the volume of data that BMG now manages has grown massively, with streaming generating up to 2,000 times the number of transactions compared to physical albums.

To pay its artists, songwriters and other rights holders, BMG must process the billions of lines of income it receives from around the world – across platforms, streaming services, radio, TV and other sources.

By installing Google Cloud’s serverless data warehouse BigQuery and open source data and analytics solution Dataproc, BMG can quickly scale its royalty processing, ensuring accurate and timely payment of artist royalties, while also reducing overall operating costs.

As part of its migration, BMG is shifting 1,500 components, servers, and databases to Google Cloud, allowing it to explore previous data points such as popularity of certain downloads among device types and ultimately discover new revenue opportunities.

In addition, Google claims data protection and privacy are provided through technological measures and a legal framework, to ensure that BMG’s data is fully protected.

BMG has also started using Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to better serve its artists and songwriter clients with more effective marketing campaigns and to help its media customers more easily discover the right music for commercials, films, and television.

BMG vice-president of group technology Gaurav Mittal said: “BMG is at its heart a service company for artists and songwriters, and we are constantly optimising 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.”

Google Cloud managing director of media and entertainment industry solutions Anil Jain added: “The rise in digital media means that content companies have to place an increasing importance in data and analytics. We are looking forward to collaborating on the innovative ways our data-driven solutions can help BMG drive new revenue streams and scale its business.”