Sony BMG Music Entertainment
"Queries no longer have to be formulated in code but can be input intuitively. This means we no longer need any specialists for the purpose."
Andreas Stange
Project Manager
Sony BMG Music Entertainment
Germany/Switzerland/Austria
Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the world's fourth largest music group, needed to replace a cumbersome mainframe license information system. Using Sybase technology, Sony BMG developed a flexible, powerful system, enhancing its service in an extremely competitive market. Business Advantage Key Benefits Sybase Technology Industry
An Extremely Complex Database
The music business is considered to be one of the most aggressive industries—and not only because of intense competition. A weak economy, combined with the market for pirated copies and illegal music downloads from the Internet, greatly reduced music industry sales over the last few years.
However, Sony BMG Music Entertainment Germany/Switzerland/Austria (GSA) has achieved incredible success in Germany. Its stable of more than 20 artists has recorded more than 170 million sales worldwide.
Its fundamental principle is that "the artist and their repertoire represent the spirit of the Sony BMG Music Entertainment music business." The licensing department (called Royalty Services) acts as the interface to their assets. It determines fees and ensures that artists are paid promptly. So it is particularly important for the department to provide them with details of the exact status of their sales and purchases even between statement periods.
The factors and strategies that give Sony BMG Music Entertainment its strength in the market also represent a particularly critical challenge for the licensing department.
"The cross-country exchange of repertoires and the multi-layer product offering gives rise to an extremely complex and heterogeneous database," said David Hodge, IT manager at Sony BMG Music Entertainment GSA.
Contracts are always complex and differentiated by the price band of the products and the country of sale. With around 100,000 titles, almost 20 million lines of data are generated. These data sets consist of 36 attributes that are defined by the users and every line has about 50 elements (accounting month, contract, label, price category, units, royalty fee, etc.)
"The licensing system is optimized to determine accurate license fees and is less suitable for reporting," said Andreas Stange, project manager for the development of a new license information system. "We have two fundamentally different business requirements. The finance department wants to know how the company is placed overall. Meanwhile, the licensing department must provide artists with information on specific requirements quickly and flexibly, and so it needs more detailed data."
In the past, license calculation and information was devolved to the mainframe system. However, this meant that for every query passed on, host experts were needed which created a considerable bottleneck.
Accessible Data, Flexible Analysis
After a market comparison and testing phase, the Sony BMG project team selected Sybase IQ as the database for its information system.
"This database proved to be very fast, with response times close to those of the host," said Christian Lang, who supported Sony BMG Music Entertainment in the integration of the database server into the central computer center. Once the team had developed the front-end interface, it took just six months after the start of testing to put the new client/server-based license information service into full operation.
The licensing department can now offer artists a much better service. "With the help of the new database, users can quickly get answers to virtually any query," Stange said. Users can carry out ad hoc analyses by track and product number, company, artist contract and 32 other criteria. Different periods can be taken into consideration, such as the current accounting period, last month, previous months and more.
"Queries no longer have to be formulated in code but can be input intuitively. This means we no longer need any specialists for the purpose," Stange said. "In this way we have opened up the system to completely new groups of users, and with specific features such as Excel export for further processing, it can be used universally."
In addition to fast and intuitive queries, the information system has proved to be very flexible in other ways, such as adapting to new requirements. "We had to, for example, introduce a new management accounting code; all this entailed was adding a new attribute," Stange said.
A Standard Platform for All Analyses
After Sybase IQ has proved its flexibility and performance on large volumes of data in the license information system, Hodge plans to use it in other areas.
"Our management accounting requirements encompass the distribution system, the licensing system and the stock accounting system," he said. "Our key goal is to bundle these systems together in a single data warehouse, thereby controlling the entire dataflow and carrying out analyses beyond conventional system boundaries."
Hodge also intends to integrate and store the data from market research, marketing and product information on Sybase IQ. "Everything on the basis of which Sony BMG Music Entertainment has to carry out analyses should, insofar as possible, be in Sybase IQ."
In addition, the license information system is acting as an international pilot project. After the other national Sony BMG Music Entertainment companies have tested the system and, as Hodge puts it, "are properly enthusiastic," they plan to use it as a back-end system. In this way, all concerned can reduce their back-end costs and obtain an even better return on investment. Given the economic position of the music industry, this is an additional benefit not to be ignored.