Client: Music Industry Company (Joint Venture)
A global recording company joint venture covering a broad roster of current artists and international superstars as well as a vast catalog comprising historically valuable recordings.
Challenges
- Exponential growth in consumer demand for the electronic delivery of music and video content had the client experiencing a multi-year, multimillion-dollar backlog in the processing of royalty payments arising from sales to digital services and mobile providers such as iTunes, RealNetworks, Verizon and Yahoo.
- Sales covered various products including audio tracks, albums, ringtones, ringback tones, image wallpapers, videos and more.
- Products were delivered to sales and distribution organizations—both mobile and Internet-based—and then sold by various electronic means.
- Because the client represented top talent in the music industry, sales quickly skyrocketed before infrastructure and processes could be set up to manage them.
- A merger was ongoing, adding more complexity to an already precarious situation.
RMK Solution
- Conducted a discovery and analysis effort to determine what would be needed to resolve the backlog.
- Provided assistance in the processing of this data for the purpose of sending it downstream to various artist and publisher royalty systems.
- Using Microsoft Office Suite software in conjunction with enterprise databases from Sybase and Oracle, set up processes and procedures and developed an ETL (extract, transform, load) and a validation operation solution normally associated with data warehousing.
- Managed and addressed a variety of new requirements due to the merger, including new target royalty systems and preprocessors, newly discovered backlogs and target populations, changing data formats, a growing and divergent product base, and the need to update and correct the source databases of several of the digital service providers.
Results
- Processed hundreds of millions of dollars in sales, significantly reducing the backlog.
- Delivered repeatable processes and structure to manage royalty payments in the future, helping the client avoid potential legal difficulties.
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