Why is NoSQL Database Good for Musicians?

AKM Chooses RavenDB to Help Ensure Musicians Get Royalties from YouTube and Spotify

You are sitting in your office getting bored. There is a meeting in about 10 minutes, and you are in between tasks. So, you put on YouTube to listen to some music. You select “Beethoven”, and out comes fifty options for his legendary fifth symphony.

You make your selection, and here we go.

Did you know that in selecting this music, you might be giving a few coins to Mr. Beethoven’s great, great, great, great copyright attorney?

For living artists, for songs played over sites like YouTube and Spotify, if you click on an ad while listening to someone’s music, the musicians who compose that piece are entitled to a royalty.

Now, that might not make much of a difference to old Ludwig, who still makes millions in royalties to this day, but what about the one-hit wonders lost to posterity and the echo chambers of our showers?

Shouldn’t Toni Basil get something for this?

AKM to the Rescue

AKM is a copyright management company that protects musical rights by ensuring that music played online and through CDs will ultimately compensate the artists who create that music.

Their members are composers, authors, and publishers. They protect their rights by working with platforms like Spotify, YouTube, and Sony Corp. to ensure that anytime their members’ music generates revenue, the artists get royalties.

They get usage data from these companies telling them which of their artist’s works was used, and they collect the royalties to deliver them to their members. They can calculate the royalty amount based on the specific rights of each artist they protect. They use RavenDB to process, verify, import/export delivery data of two big Austrian pressing plants. One is from the Sony company, located in Austria, where CDs, DVDs, and Blu Rays are delivered to clients worldwide.

RavenDB tracks the delivery data: which music, by which artists, are shipping out to get their royalties. They have been using RavenDB for years, upgrading to the current 5.2 version.

What’s the Best Database for the Job?

AKM chose RavenDB because it was the best on-premise NoSQL database for the job at hand. They use RavenDB for sending data in real-time to sister organizations, YouTube among them, using the ETL process that moves the data to reports as it comes in.

The data RavenDB sends by ETL goes to several applications housing multiple databases. In addition, RavenDB stores, prepares, and sends the information where other systems compile reports in SQL. The fast performance also enables sister companies AKM works with to support their artists save money.

The amount of data AKM produce is large and expanding over time. As a result, massive amounts of data need to be moved. RavenDB does this quickly, with no overhead. As a distributed multi-writer model, AKM enjoys high availability, keeping their database open to accommodate the platforms that are also open at all hours in every location.

The Future for AKM

AKM just upgraded several times over the past years, enjoying application stability over the coming years. This lets them focus on other areas of their application, allowing their RavenDB NoSQL Database to just work.

See for yourself! Take a live demo of RavenDB with a developer who can answer all your questions and start using data more efficiently today.