BMG selects Google Cloud as global infrastructure to grow digital music business

BMG has selected Google Cloud to build a scalable, global infrastructure as it grows its digital music business and forges new revenue streams.

In BMG’s first half report for 2020, published in September, digital revenues grew to 59% as a share of its total revenue of US$310.8 million from 56% in the same period in 2019.

The October posting was the “best first-half result since BMG was founded in 2008,” the company said. “It came despite the forced closure of 19 offices worldwide due to the pandemic.”

The German HQ’d company said in a statement: “This fundamental shift to digital means that the volume of data that BMG now manages has grown exponentially, with streaming generating 1,500-2,000x 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, television and many other sources.”

Now, with Google Cloud’s BigQuery, a serverless enterprise data warehouse and Dataproc, an open-source data and analytics processing solution, BMG can easily add or delete computing resources to quickly scale its royalty processing, “ensuring accurate and timely payment of artist royalties, while also reducing overall operating costs.”

As part of its infrastructure migration, BMG is shifting 1,500 components, servers, and databases to Google Cloud, which operates in 150 countries.

With its modelling data in Google Cloud, BMG can then more easily explore previous data points such as popularity of certain downloads among device types and ultimately discover new revenue opportunities.

“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,” explained Gaurav Mittal, its vice president of group technology.

Anil Jain, managing director of media and entertainment, industry solutions at Google Cloud, added: “The rise in digital media means that content companies have to place an increasing importance in data and analytics.

“We’re thrilled to work with BMG and are looking forward to collaborating on the innovative ways our data-driven solutions can help the company drive new revenue streams and scale its business.”

Recently, BMG started leveraging Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) 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.