The music industry is rapidly changing. Only 20 years ago, the availability of music and the infrastructure that was required to make an album a sales success were incredibly complex and expensive. With the decline of physical sales and a fundamental shift to digital, music streaming now accounts for more than half of all sales globally.

At the same time, technology has democratized music-making; in many ways, it has made the musical landscape more diverse. Artists can upload their music with the click of a button. But while it’s easier for creators to share their songs with audiences, getting paid has become more fragmented.

Although music is booming, people no longer buy it outright. Instead, listeners download music digitally or subscribe to streaming services to have their libraries with them at all times. To monetize digital content effectively, artists need to know when, where, and how often their songs are played on each service. To help them navigate this complicated royalties landscape and maximize their profits, Berlin-based international music company BMG provides customized, transparent, and fair services to songwriters and artists.

With publishing and recording divisions under one roof, the subsidiary of international media giant Bertelsmann works with both emerging artists and established stars, including John Legend, Kylie Minogue, Mick Jagger, and Keith Richards. With the MyBMG web and mobile application, clients can view and analyze their royalty details in real time and collect payment. When a new record is released, BMG uses data to maximize its impact and revenue for its creators.

“We make sure that everyone who uses our clients’ music knows who needs to be paid the associated royalties, then we collect these royalties and share them out quickly and transparently,” explains Sebastian Hentzschel, Chief Information Officer at BMG. “When our artists release new music, we make sure that it’s marketed and promoted effectively around the world.”

“We needed a scalable solution for our royalty workloads that was intuitive for our developers. We also wanted a partner, not a client-vendor relationship. With autoscaling via BigQuery, excellent customer support, and a clean and simple user interface, Google Cloud ticks every box for us.”

—Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology, BMG

Getting up to speed with a new way of paying artists

In this digital world, artists aren’t just paid every time a fan buys an album—they’re paid a small amount, or royalty, for each song downloaded or streamed by a listener. So, when the industry shifted to digital, the volume of data that BMG needed to handle grew exponentially. “One CD sale is equivalent to about 1,500 streamed songs or plays,” says Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology at BMG. “That means IT departments have to process 1,500 times the amount of data to calculate payments for artists, and this makes scalable micropayment processing very important.”

Until 2019, BMG’s infrastructure was entirely hosted on-premises. Hardware limitations made it challenging to scale on-demand, making it harder to handle the data peaks that royalty processing can bring. “With our on-premises infrastructure, we were going to hit a ceiling in a few years,” says Gaurav. “We still managed to process royalty payments for our clients, but it was increasingly time consuming and expensive. To keep focusing on our clients, rather than our infrastructure, we decided to migrate to Google Cloud.”

From the outset, Gaurav and his team had a clear vision for the partnership: “Most importantly, we needed a scalable solution for our royalty workloads that was intuitive for our developers. We also wanted a partner, not a client-vendor relationship,” he says. “With autoscaling via BigQuery, excellent customer support, and a clean and simple user interface, Google Cloud ticks every box for us.”

Keeping artists happy with business-as-usual payouts during migration

To move applications to the cloud while keeping payment cycles on track for its artists, BMG teamed up with Google Cloud partner Rackspace Technology. “We selected Rackspace Technology because it combines strong technical muscle and a global footprint, with the customer service of a local boutique firm,“ shares Gaurav.

BMG’s own technology team put together the outline for the Google Cloud architecture, which they passed on to Rackspace Technology for optimizations and the ultimate stamp of approval. Whenever Gaurav and his developers needed support, Rackspace Technology was ready to go. “So far, we’ve migrated 17 applications successfully, and Rackspace Technology has been 100% spot-on with each suggestion,” says Gaurav. “I can’t recall a single flaw in a Rackspace Technology-approved architecture, and that really says something.”

When BMG began its migration in August 2019, the team developed an ambitious two-year plan. Only 14 months later, however, the project is more than 75% complete. Among the solutions that BMG is using today are Cloud Storage to securely store 130 TB of data, and Cloud SQL as its standard database technology. The web applications run on Compute Engine, App Engine, and Google Kubernetes Engine.

“After successfully moving a few applications, it was clear that with the strong teamwork of BMG and Rackspace Technology, together with the ease of use of Google Cloud, we could speed up the project without sacrificing quality,” says Gaurav. “We’re set to complete our migration six months before schedule, helping us to quickly move out of our hybrid environment.”

“Our income-tracking teams are very savvy on the data, and the simplicity of Google Cloud empowers them to self-serve analytics, rather than wait for IT. Our teams are much more productive.”

—Gaurav Mittal, Vice President Group Technology at BMG

Royalty reporting and processing with BigQuery and Dataproc

So far, all of BMG’s critical workloads are up and running on Google Cloud. Royalty calculations, for example, which require incredible processing power and the collection of many micropayments to ensure full and timely payout, run entirely on Dataproc with output stored on BigQuery for downstream integration and reporting.

Enabling more harmonious workflows through self-serve analytics

As the new beating heart of BMG’s royalty reporting, BigQuery changed the rhythm of collaboration company-wide. In the past, income tracking teams had to contact IT departments if they needed deeper data insights for their work. By integrating Data Catalog with BigQuery, BMG has made the data more accessible to all teams. This helps them detect missing income and new revenue streams independently, maximizing profits for artists.

“Our income-tracking teams are very savvy on the data, and the simplicity of Google Cloud empowers them to self-serve analytics, rather than wait for IT,” says Gaurav. “Our teams are much more productive.”

“Google Cloud enables us to be more client focused and deliver better features faster. We believe it’s just the beginning. We offer rights and royalty services for music publishing, recorded music, neighboring rights, and books. Without scalability limitations, it’s absolutely conceivable to offer our platform as a service to other companies or industries, such as gaming. Google Cloud has opened a world of possibilities.”

—Sebastian Hentzschel, Chief Information Officer, BMG

With a leaner IT environment, BMG can focus its effort on the needs of its clients. Beyond improvements in royalty processing, it can concentrate on app development, releasing new features and enhancements more frequently. By hosting applications on Google Kubernetes Engine, App Engine, and Compute Engine, BMG has built a CI/CD pipeline with automated deployments and testing to significantly speed up workflows.

“In our old system, it could take several weeks to set up an environment,” says Gaurav. “With Google Kubernetes Engine, any of our developers can complete the process in a few clicks. Having that autonomy makes our developers more motivated and self-driven.”

“Google Cloud enables us to be more client focused and deliver better features faster,” adds Sebastian. “We believe it’s just the beginning. We offer rights and royalty services for music publishing, recorded music, neighboring rights, and books. Without scalability limitations, it’s absolutely conceivable to offer our platform as a service to other companies or industries, such as gaming. Google Cloud has opened a world of possibilities.”

With the migration almost complete, BMG is looking forward to its next technology project. It plans to leverage AutoML to further scale and automate royalty tracking with machine learning. On the marketing side, advanced analytics will help BMG determine the effectiveness of promotional campaigns around the world, further increasing profits for artists. By connecting Google Data Studio to BigQuery, BMG will increase the quality of its analyses, helping musicians better understand the reach of their music around the world.

In the end, Gaurav shares, helping musicians is what it all comes down to. “We’re a new kind of music company because we build our services around our artist, songwriter, and publisher clients, not the other way around,” he says. “Google Cloud is helping us maintain strong relationships with our clients, and that’s music to our ears.”

As we think about economic recovery from COVID-19—both inside Google and outside through working with Google Cloud customers—we’ve made many important observations. Among them is the recognition that the ways software developers and IT practitioners work together will shift in the post COVID-19 world. Our economic recovery today will look different than past recoveries, and on a fundamental level, the way we innovate will be different than it’s ever been before.

Right now, we’re entering a new phase of cloud computing, where businesses have shifted from making tactical infrastructure decisions, to making larger IT decisions with an eye towards enabling transformation throughout the company. Data, and what we can do with that data, is key to this transformation. And how companies put data in the hands of every employee to help catalyze transformation and solve the most important and impactful opportunities in their industries is at the core.  

A recent Google-commissioned study by IDG highlighted the role of data analytics and intelligent solutions when it comes to helping businesses separate from their competition. The survey of 2,000 IT leaders across the globe reinforced the notion that the ability to derive insights from data will go a long way towards determining which companies win in this new era.

Data analytics and intelligence were prioritized during COVID-19

The results of the IDG study show a separation amongst those organizations that embrace the capabilities of today’s data analytics and AI/ML tools and those that do not. When COVID-19 hit, many organizations cancelled IT initiatives, with 55% of respondents delaying or cancelling at least one technology project. However, 32% of respondents accelerated or introduced initiatives around building out or improving the use of data analytics and intelligence. IT leaders realize how critical data is to their future success, even when resources are scarce.

Digital-focused companies are faster to embrace advanced intelligence tools

Furthermore, enthusiasm for big data analytics, AI, and ML technologies is highest among companies who are further along in their digital transformation journeys. Fifty-four percent of companies who identify as “Fully digitally transformed” or “Digital native” are using or considering using these tools, vs. the global average of 37%. And, these same organizations are embracing the promise of AI more than their peers. Forty-eight percent felt that “Embedded AI across our full stack of cloud solutions will be critical” vs 39% of digital conservatives. These companies realize these digital tools enable them to be more resilient, agile, and prepared for whatever the future brings.

Companies are turning to cloud to maximize insights from data

As companies tap into the promise of data analytics and AI/ML, they are turning to cloud for help. When considering which cloud providers to work with, 78% of respondents said big data analysis is a “must have” or a “major consideration,” which placed this capability at the top of the list of consideration factors. This is not surprising, as cloud solutions address the most common pain points and barriers to innovation. Three of the respondents’ top four areas impeding innovation are addressed by cloud: Insufficient IT & developer skill sets (1st), security risks and concerns (2nd), and legacy systems and technologies (4th). Plus, cloud makes it easier to quickly launch a project, scale up or scale down, and pay for only what you use.

COVID-19 changed the very nature of business, and of IT. It forced IT leaders to decide where to put their scarce resources and big data analytics and AI/ML were, understandably, at the top of the list. To learn more about the findings, download the IDG report “No turning back: How the pandemic reshaped digital business agendas.”

“Any device, anytime, anywhere.” A cohort of CIOs within Airbus believed that the cloud, combined with new ways of working, could provide the foundation for this vision. Google Workspace and Google Cloud have played a pivotal role in helping Airbus realize this new path, transforming security, data management, and collaboration along the way.

Adopting a secure-by-design approach

In adopting Google Workspace and Google Cloud Airbus needed to ensure a robust, zero-trust security model that works across the entire organization, even when employees are working outside the office. Google Workspace provides a single login that enables secure access to data, based on device and user information, as well as contextual inputs that inform the security risk of each login and user action. Airbus admins also use Google Workspace to define trust rules that govern what information and files can be shared within and outside the organization, making it easy for employees to comply with best practices from anywhere.

Encryption also plays a central role in keeping information secure and private. By default, Google Workspace uses the latest cryptographic standards to encrypt all data at rest and in transit. Google Workspace also offers client-side encryption, which Airbus uses for their most sensitive projects, giving them authoritative control over their data as the sole owner of their encryption keys.

And to ensure the organization is protected against hackers, Airbus has implemented sharding as a standard practice, thereby splitting data across multiple servers and data centers. Because the company works with incredibly sensitive information—including government and military information—the ability to locate data all within European data centers continues to be a necessity.

Powerful data management

Managing an enormous volume and variety of data, Airbus needs to ensure complete compliance with internal policies, as well as with external standards, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Given this context, Airbus requires a solution that has strong built-in governance controls. Airbus also leverages the Drive labels feature, along with manual classification, to ensure that every file added to Google Drive is tagged and labeled correctly. In turn, these labels define the loss-prevention policies assigned to each file.

Staying connected during the pandemic

Before the pandemic, nearly every employee spent their workdays at an Airbus facility. When remote work became mandatory, the company made the pivot to Google Chat and Google Meet as an essential part of supporting real-time and asynchronous collaboration. Gmail also played a significant role in secure, anywhere-anytime communication, with its built-in anti-spam and anti-malware protections. Customizable filters let administrators protect against suspicious attachments, untrustworthy links, and countless other forms of malicious content. While Gmail blocks more than 99.9% of spam and phishing messages from ever reaching users’ inboxes, more advanced security measures like sandboxing can be put in place for specific use cases.

Protecting more than just data

Google Cloud’s sustainability efforts are as equally important to Airbus as data security. Google Cloud has been working to keep its climate footprint and those who use its services as low as possible, with all of Google currently carbon neutral and with a goal to run on carbon-free energy 24/7 at all of our data centers by 2030. And with our smarter, more efficient data centers, we’re already on that path with more than six times the computing power for the same amount of electrical power we used 5 years ago.

Building the future of work

By combining Google Workspace with Google Cloud, Airbus has been able to live up to its vision of “any device, anytime, anywhere.” The new model is a core foundation for its evolving future of work. Not only has Airbus adopted a zero-trust model across the organization, it’s also transformed how data is secured, managed, and accessed by employees working across a broad range of locations. The new flexible approach has also led to changes in how collaboration happens. Google is deeply gratified to have supported Airbus as they implement these changes and we continue to be proud that we’re running the cleanest cloud in the industry.

Want to learn more about how Google Workspace helps businesses like yours do more while keeping your data secure? Read this whitepaper to find out about our zero-trust model and other ways we protect organizations.

Building a strong brand in today’s hyper-competitive business environment takes vision. It also requires a flexible, easily managed approach to digital asset management (DAM), so marketing professionals and other stakeholders can easily share, store, track, and manipulate assets to build the brand.

Many of today’s leading companies, including JetBlue, Slack, TripAdvisor, Lyft, and HealthONE, rely on Brandfolder to deliver consistent, organized, and efficient brand experiences. Brandfolder provides an easy-to-use platform that can scale across an entire company with little end-user training, empowering customers to distribute digital assets wherever they are needed. Customers also gain much greater insight into how those assets are used, and how to use them more effectively in marketing campaigns and brand messaging.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform.”

—Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science, Brandfolder

Brandfolder is constantly advancing its development efforts to introduce new data-driven features without complicating the user experience. Big data, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) are key to meeting customers’ unique business needs, and essential for Brandfolder to compete in the fast-moving DAM industry. To enhance these capabilities, Brandfolder sought a public cloud provider that could help it scale its data pipeline cost effectively while providing access to advanced AI technologies.

After graduating from the Techstars startup accelerator program in 2013, Brandfolder tried two other cloud providers before standardizing on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).

“We saw a difference with Google Cloud from the very beginning because the interactions felt like a strategic relationship,” says Jim Hanifen, Head of Product at Brandfolder. “Google gave us startup credits and a lot of face-to-face support, which we hadn’t experienced with other cloud providers. We decided to move our entire infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform.”

Building an ML platform for brand intelligence

After performing an initial lift-and-shift migration of virtual machines (VMs) onto Compute Engine, Brandfolder built an ML platform using GCP managed services to seamlessly deliver its data products. The platform leverages Cloud SQL, Cloud Storage as the data lake, Cloud Dataproc for cloud-native Apache Spark computing clusters, Cloud Composer as the batch job scheduler, Cloud Pub/Sub as the backbone data pipeline, Container Registry to store Docker images, and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) as the application orchestrator. Cloud Dataflow brings data into the data lake and into BigQuery for analysis.

“Google Cloud made it easy to build an ML platform to quickly iterate through different brand intelligence use cases and release data-driven product features into the Brandfolder platform,” says Ajay Rajasekharan, Head of Data Science at Brandfolder, who describes the architecture in a detailed blog. “We simply ingest raw application and event data on one end and output an ML service on the other.”

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost. We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

—Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering, Brandfolder

For many general use cases, Brandfolder does not need to build custom ML models, and instead relies on pre-trained API models from GCP. For example, it uses Vision API and Video Intelligence API to auto-tag creative assets on import to enable fast, intuitive searches across images and videos. When more product- and brand-specific modeling is required to address unique customer use cases, Brandfolder builds and trains custom ML models using its GCP pipeline or Cloud AutoML, a suite of products built on Google transfer learning and neural architecture search technology. For example, if a Brandfolder customer makes different types of grills, Brandfolder can use AutoML Vision to train a model to recognize the different grills.

“Moving to Google Cloud Platform allows us to complete more sophisticated data analysis and ML models much faster, and at a much lower cost,” explains Brett Nekolny, Head of Engineering at Brandfolder. “We can create brand-specific ML models 12x faster and get them into production quickly to address our customers’ unique business needs.”

Industry-leading security and performance

Google Cloud’s security model helps Brandfolder give existing and prospective customers peace of mind that their data will be protected. Cloud Identity & Access Management (Cloud IAM) provides enterprise-grade access control, while Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) enables remote users to work more securely without the hassles of a VPN client. GCP also isolates cloud resources into projects, making it easy to assign permissions and keep data and VMs organized and segregated.

“With Google Cloud, everything begins and ends with security, which makes things very easy for us,” says Jim. “If we’re under a security review, we can submit a Google security white paper. If a potential customer has security concerns, we tell them we are hosted on GCP, and those concerns go away.”

To give customers even better application performance for accessing their brand assets, Brandfolder uses Cloud Memorystore, an in-memory data store service for Redis, to cache data and provide sub-millisecond data access for production applications.

“It was much easier for us to use Cloud Memorystore versus running Redis on our compute instances,” says Brett. “The high availability, replication across zones, and automatic failover with no data loss are big for us.”

Global private network interconnects between Google Cloud and the Fastly content delivery network (CDN) dramatically reduce latency, allowing Brandfolder’s customers to deliver and update even very large creative assets quickly around the world.

“What’s beautiful about the relationship between Google and Fastly is that if one of our customers uploads a new version of an asset, we can propagate that out to Fastly, and the new version will automatically show up in all the places where it’s referenced,” says Brett.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter. Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”

—Jim Hanifen, Head of Product, Brandfolder

Improving employee and customer productivity

Brandfolder also uses Google solutions for real-time collaboration and productivity, using G Suite to connect employees with intuitive, cloud-based apps. Teams use Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Sheets, Slides, and Hangouts Meet every day to move the business forward. Many of Brandfolder’s customers are also G Suite users, and Brandfolder offers a plug-in that allows them to view their creative assets inside of Docs and pull images in as needed. Customers can also log into Brandfolder with their G Suite credentials, making the solution even easier to use.

“We’ve been using G Suite since the beginning, and it’s helped us collaborate efficiently to build a successful, growing company,” says Jim. “Our teams expect to have that kind of close collaboration, and everyone here enjoys the G Suite experience.”

Driving 99 percent annual business growth

With automated tagging and other innovative AI-based features, Brandfolder is helping customers locate and distribute assets faster. As a result, Brandfolder is building customer loyalty and increasing sales, growing its business by 99 percent year-over-year. Since moving to GCP, Brandfolder has been able to scale its analytics and data pipeline 50x without a corresponding increase in costs and has not had to expand its development team.

“The ability to quickly solve problems with AI has a substantial impact on our revenue, and that’s more apparent every quarter,” says Jim. “Few of our competitors are doing product- or brand-specific modeling because it takes a lot of time and resources. We overcame those hurdles with Google Cloud.”