When runner-up EMI turned a fragmented Web infrastructure into a centralized service, IT found new sources of revenue.
Garth Brooks, Pink Floyd and Wynton Marsalis have about as much in common as a kazoo and a synthesizer. But these performers are all jammin’ online, thanks to a new Web infrastructure and service-oriented application architecture EMI Music North America developed for its music labels – well-known brands such as Capital Records and Virgin Records – and the hundreds of artists recording under those music labels.
Application flexibility gained from the service-oriented architecture is providing the music labels, essentially EMI business units, unprecedented flexibility. This while IT turned its Web infrastructure from an unmanaged liability into a potential revenue-generator. For these accomplishments, achieved with a budget of less than $1 million, we honor EMI Music North America as a 2004 User Excellence Award runner-up.
“This is the first time as an IT organization that we are no longer a bottleneck . . . but can work proactively with the business to help set strategy,” says Seth Brady, director of application services at EMI Music North America in New York. “IT is now a service group looking to be leveraged by multiple music labels.”
Previously, IT had nothing to do with Web efforts for the music labels. Each music label had a New Media Department, mostly marketing specialists, handling Web site development. And, each music label “did its own thing” when it came to selecting servers, databases and application development platforms for their Web operations, says Brady, who previously supported an intranet and extranet for EMI’s central sales and marketing group. Some music labels favored Windows, Internet Information Server (IIS) and ASP.Net; others swore by Linux, Apache server and Java Server Pages (JSP).
The sites were snazzy, but behind their cool façades was an IT mess. “The labels quickly became tied to a very limited form of Web marketing because the technology couldn’t support new initiatives,” Brady says.
Each music label essentially had a homegrown Web content management system for every artist site. Each time an artist released an album, “all the meta data associated with that album and all the digital assets would need to go into these homegrown systems,” he says. “We quickly realized the strong need for a central application that could be used to syndicate this kind of content out to the types of Web sites we were managing.”
Plus, almost every music label would load its myriad artist sites onto one hosted server and database, Brady says.
“We had quite a number of Web and database servers that had absolutely zero scalability, and each label was plagued with a single point of failure. If one Web server went down, it could take out 30 different artist Web sites,” Brady says.
An EMI Group corporate overhaul in February 2002 provided the impetus for change. As part of that restructuring, EMI Group appointed a CEO, CFO and COO for North America and gave this executive management team bottom-line responsibility for U.S. and Canadian operations. Among the first orders of business was to pool IT resources into one North American group that could support the music labels, Brady says. That centralized IT group immediately resolved to tackle the Web problem. Its goal was twofold: create an extensible application architecture, and consolidate Web servers and databases to create a more cost-effective, flexible and scalable infrastructure.
On tour now
Heading the 15-member team, Brady launched project planning of the “North American Web site consolidation project” in January. Phase 1 implementation, encompassing major application and infrastructure overhauls, ran from May through November. Phase 2, for Web services extensions and additional infrastructure consolidation, is scheduled for April to December 2005, he says.
Web services seemed a natural fit, not only to address the content duplication but also to enable future business opportunities, Brady says. “Web services would allow us to put a layer of abstraction between the data we’re managing on the back end with . . . our own label and artist Web sites,” he says. “But, with a mechanism in place for syndicating content out, I no longer have to own the Web sites. I can expose a series of services . . . to fan sites, or partners or customers to get those similar artist updates out.”
Brady illustrates his point with a Web service the project team developed for tour data. Music labels used to store tour data in as many as seven databases, Brady says. Now they input all tour-related data into a central application. This tour data includes public information, such as appearance dates and venues, and private details, such as artist flight and hotel arrangements. A Web service manages all this event-based data, relying on each site’s unique username and password to deliver appropriate information.
So if a fan goes to www.beastieboys.com and clicks on the “Tour” button, the site calls the Web service for the show dates and venues. The ASP.Net-based Web service checks the site username and password, authenticates it as a public Web site using Microsoft’s Web Services Enhancements 2.0, and delivers the public tour information. Simultaneously, that same Web service could be called from a Capital Records intranet application. Based on the intranet’s username and password, the Web service would deliver not only the tour dates and venues, but the group’s travel plans.
In Phase 2, music labels will have the option of teaming with unofficial fan sites – say www.beastiemania.com – to deliver official tour schedules. Clicking for more information on a tour date would then land fans on the label-run artist site – and provide EMI with potential e-commerce customers for CDs and other merchandise.
But that’s not all. Also in Phase 2, the music labels could send tour updates directly to fans who subscribe to a “backstage pass” Web service. Because the Web service distributes XML data, the tour data doesn’t need to be delivered to a Web site, Brady says. “Through [Short Message Service] messaging, for example, we can use our services to send messages directly to a consumer’s cell phone saying, ‘[Beastie Boys] have just added 15 tour dates. Tickets are going on sale within the next 48 hours,'” he says. “This is where Web services drastically change the business model and allows us as an organization to interact with fans directly.”
EMI also intends to push digital assets out to its extranet partners, such as retailers, Brady says. “It’s difficult for our major customers to go to individual sites and download front cover artwork for their product pages. This will make it easy for us to push digital assets to our customers and ensure that we get better placement and visibility on their Web sites,” he explains.
Besides the tour data Web service, the project team has developed services for publishing news updates; updating e-mail mailing lists; and enhancing sites with artist discographies, CD track information and cover art. The aim is to reduce the cost of building artist sites, Brady says. For example, music labels no longer need to pay site design firms for the code needed to update news releases or add fan e-mail addresses to a mailing list. Instead, IT provides designers with a few lines of code, which are exposed to the various Web services. “The data then gets fed to the site automatically. And since the data is coming from a master source that we’re managing on the back end, we can be sure the data is accurate,” Brady says.
To get ready for the Web services, the project team had to convert about 40 JSP-developed Web sites to ASP.Net, Brady says. “We needed to make sure we could host all the sites and that they could call the services dynamically and within the security framework,” he says, adding that the conversion took about two months.
The team worked with Avanade, a Microsoft technology integrator that offers a development framework of auditing, security management and batch processing functions. Avanade also helped on the infrastructure side, where the project team needed to consolidate from the eight original hosting providers down to one – Rackspace – for a fully managed service.
In Phase 1, EMI consolidated roughly 100 EMI sites hosted at the two largest providers by moving those Web environments to the new Web infrastructure at Rackspace. The project team built out two fully redundant IIS Web farms, a high-availability SQL 2000 database cluster, load-balanced .Net application servers and one-plus terabytes of online storage for digital assets, Brady says. The number of servers remains consistent at 19, but Rackspace has standardized on high-end Dell PowerEdge servers that give EMI “tremendous overall improvement in performance and scalability” over the old servers, Brady says.
The high notes
Next year, the project team plans to migrate the sites from the remaining six hosting providers to Rackspace without needing to add hardware. “At that point, we may be able to retire upwards of 12 additional servers, reducing our overall server volume by approximately 40% after a full two-year implementation,” he says.
Based on the infrastructure piece alone, EMI expects an ROI of about 30% to 40% of implementation costs with the project paying for itself within three years, Brady says. That’s music to the ears of the North American management team.
