Building Solutions and Architectures for Music Industry in Various Cloud Platforms

Lets first understand the landscape of Music Industry. How it operates and stores its assets and distributes its final product.

Music producers begin with their artists who use digital instruments to record the final product which is stored in digital format on some storage medium. Finally the song or music piece is sent to consumer who is a producer of another film or just the consumer itself. This is simple flow.

Lets break down above into specifications in general baseline terms.

1. A Contract begins with consumer and an Idea is sketchy with the music producer.
2. Music producer engages copywriters and other instrument artists who begin to collaborate. In present circumstances, the producer is forced to work with local artists who can come to his studio and record along with others. This is a limitation which does not allow a music producer to work with geographically scattered talent.
3. The recorded music is stored on recording devices which are local in nature and sometimes it is copied on flash drives which have its own issues. Storage and archiving of music is big issue which plagues music industry. Some of the historical music has lost its master copy because of storage issue.
4. Distribution of media content is another issue. If a music producer is making music for mass consumption or stock media, the current format of distribution relies on human efforts.

Essential parts of this scenario are :

Team and resource collaboration --> Produce --> Store ---> Distribute --> Archive

There are many applications which are pre-built for team and resource collaboration which can be used. However, a custom app can be built using the services and available options which can use Azure CDN and in other clouds the similar options. Integrate such app with third party talent sourcing sites and options where you can post directly your requirements. Manage your team from there.

The next step is produce. You need an application which can run and collaborate streaming from various sources. Such as someone playing guitar in London, keyboard in Singapore, vocalist in SriLanka and other artists somewhere else. All managed from a studio to record a music piece. A central server and application running on cloud can make this possible.

Next is storage, almost all cloud providers offer CDN and other general storage options which can directly be linked with recording application and storage is possible through that.

Distribution is a key area which can be entirely be taken care by CDN or one can built the custom app to take care of that. From cloud to other distribution networks, the delivery is easy as it is not dependent on local bandwidth.

Archival of old music can be placed on different low cost networks and one can buy a storage options to keep it available offline.

There are clear advantages here:

1. It lowers the cost in overall terms.
2. It lets you use global talent.
3. Music producer can reach more audiences and can serve more customers.
4. All records are safely stored and archived.
5. High definition music will be a reality for the producers who cannot afford expensive setups in traditional ways.

One can use Amazon Web Services of Microsoft Azure platforms to deliver end-to-end solution. If it is me, I will go with any of these two and considering where and how we can save money for music producer. There are many areas where money can be saved and better solution can be tailor-made.

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About Author: Mahendra has been working for 17 Years in technology strategy consulting, development, legacy ERP applications, pre-sales, cloud enterprise architectural frameworks for Blockchain, Multi-Cloud IaaS, PaaS and SaaS based upon TOGAF 9.1, Zachman, FEA using Troux. Mahendra is one of the rare experts who has worked on Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Oracle Cloud, Amazon Web Services, IBM Bluemix, IBM Blockchain, HyperLedger, OpenLedger, OpenStack and SAP HCP and HEC. Designed migration strategies and framework for Office 365 Solution Architecture. Also architected end to end solutions involving Azure IoT, HDInsight, Big Data, Machine Learning and others. Mahendra is open to all possibilities. You can send him a message if you wish to discuss shared knowledge or exciting opportunities.