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Tuning the Streams for Music Artists
Tuning the Streams for Music Artists
Tuning the Streams for Music Artists
Mar 28, 2023
In this episode
This story is about Kobalt Music Group, founded in 2000 in New York City, with founder Willard Ahdritz, a native of Sweden. Kobalt’s initial business model focused on collecting and distributing royalties for artists, with the stated goal of ensuring artists were paid appropriately and promptly. When Kobalt collects royalties for an artist, it tracks thousands of data points. For example, a single global hit that pulled in £4.8 million in sales uses up to 60 pieces of metadata—crucial identifiers to make sure the right people get paid. These include industry codes for the song’s 5 writers, 5 publishers, 9 lead musicians and session musicians, 11 officially recorded versions of the song, and 8 official remixes. Royalties flowed in from 100 territories worldwide. Spotify streamed it 170 million times to 3.2 million listeners before it was pulled. Kobalt collected micropayments on each of these uses directly from these platforms, putting it up on its portal line by line in real time.
Guests
João Pereira
João has 12+ years of professional experience as a software engineer and engineering manager with an emphasis on design and delivery of Java applications. Driven by a keen interest in engineering and organisational structures, João aspires to work with driven-like people with whom he can share a vision. His current focus is to improve his managerial skills & strategic thinking.
Vinay Thakkar
Vinay has worked with Java technologies nearly for 2 decades. At Kobalt, he is the leading the development of a system that handles the collection and distribution of billions of royalties for the artists. Wired reported in 2015 that Kobalt was “the top independent music publisher in the UK and the second overall (to Sony/ATV) in the US,” with around 600,000 songs and 8000 artists in its catalogue. The new system Kobalt has built to handle billions of royalties from various sources for these 600,000 songs is built on hard work put in Spring Framework primarily Spring Cloud Function, Spring Cloud Stream (Kafka KSreams), Spring Data, Spring Webflow.
Hosts
Tiffany Jernigan
Tiffany is a senior developer advocate at VMware and is focused on Kubernetes. She previously worked as a software developer and developer advocate (nerd whisperer) for containers at Amazon. She also formerly worked at Docker and Intel. Prior to that, she graduated from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering. In her free time she really likes to travel and dabble in photography. You can find her on Twitter @tiffanyfayj.