EMI Music Publishing | First Global Digital Music Publishing Platform
Transformation of an Inefficient Legacy System into a
Comprehensive, Contract-based Platform
Axispoint developed the first global, deals-based music publishing system for a major publisher, partnering with EMI Music Publishing in 2002 to build a global synchronization licensing system, and then again from 2006 – 2012 to build a suite of custom enterprise music publishing systems to replace legacy systems that had been running for over twenty years.
Prior to Axispoint’s engagement, EMI faced an inability to review the global health of the business. There was non-existent enterprise reporting and no visibility into royalty profits.
We designed, developed and delivered complex custom software that integrated rights, licensing and invaluable royalty data from artists like David Bowie, Queen, Katy Perry and Coldplay into one global system that provided a holistic view of the company’s assets.
Our global team of software architects, database engineers, BPM specialists, business analysts, quality assurance experts and DevOps engineers worked closely with stakeholders around the world to define, build, rollout and support a software vision that was a first in the industry.
Axispoint executed on a business transformation goal, restructuring and automating time consuming business processes – not only automating the execution of those processes but the generation of the data they managed – drastically reducing staffing overheads and significantly improving data accuracy.
As part of the custom enterprise solution, Axispoint developed for EMI a complex royalty processing system that processes millions of dollars of global royalties received from thousands of licensees for the exploitation of works through the sales of physical recording media, air plays, web streaming plays, use in television and movies, sales through iTunes, and other distribution channels. The volume of royalty data received was immense – hundreds of millions of royalty transactions annually.
In addition to processing this data for royalty distribution to copyright owners, Axispoint was tasked with making this large volume of data available for meaningful financial reporting and analysis. Axispoint provided business intelligence: an up-to-date data warehouse enabling users to design and execute global financial reports.
Axispoint’s efforts also enabled artist representatives to provide real-time insight on royalty earnings to the copyright owners, information that was previously stale by 6 months. Axispoint developed a dashboard for each contract that presented the current state of royalties earned and predicted future earnings, with the ability to dissect the data by territory and financial period and to see the data in various currencies. Not only did this give copyright owners insight to their pipeline, it also provided the business intelligence on the lucrativeness of the contract.
And we provided hands-on support to the project teams and business users throughout the whole process, assisting with the transition to the new product and cementing a strong relationship with our client.
Tech Stack: Oracle (on premise), JBOSS, IBM BPM, Itemfield, Java Swing, Solr, Java Message Bus