Universal Music Group understood that the disruptive potential of data generated by digital music consumption and listener activity on social networks was an opportunity to shape and focus both their marketing campaigns and their overall strategies in the digital world.

In order to foster this new data-centric way of working, Universal needed compelling tools and easy-to-understand visualizations of complex data. They also recognized that their existing platform would be unable to scale to meet the challenges presented by these volumes of data.

Release Consulting's blend of industry and technical expertise made us the ideal partner to help them meet this challenge.

Release Consulting were asked to architect and build a business intelligence application from scratch – including:

• Integration of many different data sources
• Structuring of data to enable slicing by artist, product, time, territory and many other dimensions
• Design of analytical 'cubes', enabling fast querying of huge volumes of data
• Creation of dashboards to support both casual and expert users, giving easy access to insights previously only available from complex reports

To deliver business value as early as possible, the project took an Agile/iterative approach, with new functionality released every 2-4 weeks.

The application is now being rolled out worldwide, enabling users at all levels of the organization to have information on performance and trends at their fingertips. The application currently manages over 7 billion rows of data, proving that scale and performance can be combined.

Paul Gathercole, VP Digital Tools at UMG says:

“The Release Consulting team helped us to turn our ideas into reality. Their combination of deep industry knowledge with functional, analytical and technical skills was key to the success of the project, as was their ability to integrate and work with the in-house team.”

The project has also been featured in an article on Music & Technology in The Economist.