Great Music Comes From Collaboration

Founded in 2008, BMG is the fourth-biggest music company in the world. Its fresh approach includes music publishing and recordings among other services, combined with innovative digital offerings off the same service platform. BMG is owned by the global media, services and education company Bertelsmann.   

BMG and Valtech have had a growing business relationship for nine years. BMG knew early on that it needed an agile and experienced partner who could provide holistic, end-to-end support for new digital services and understood BMG's business models. Together, the two partners have realized more than 25 launches to date. 

The challenge is to implement applications cost-effectively at high speed and with strong customization for a global company with multiple stakeholders in 12 territories. BMG is strongly oriented towards the needs of its customers: Artists, songwriters, publishers, and more.

In 2012, it all started with a small relaunch on bespoke technology to avoid a vendor lock-in scenario. One of the needs BMG faced was having a central portal that displays all income streams a creator has with BMG in one portal, in a user-friendly and clear interface. This kind of functionality and providing a single source of truth in the form of an easy to navigate dashboard has been gaining in popularity with a lot of companies that rely on their digital platforms to deliver crucial information to their clients.  

The music industry is very specific in nature and there were no off the shelf products that supported end-to-end operations for an innovative music company. Therefore, the decision was made to build the solution instead of attempting to buy a ready-made tech stack. Using an Agile Scrum methodology featuring cross-cultural teams to meet the needs of BMG’s global presence, we chose different pieces of technology (Elastic Search, Apache Wicket, etc.) to create a one-stop service portal for clients, hosted on Google Cloud, that met BMG’s needs. myBMG was born and it is now the most important, industry-leading platform, the single source of truth, bringing personalization and data intelligence together. 

In addition to the web application, a mobile application was also developed. The goal was to expand the design and application possibilities, as well as to adapt the solution to the needs of BMG and its customers. 

Find out more: https://bmg.com/de/tools.html 

These projects are just a fraction of the work we continue to do with BMG. Over the years of our partnership, we’ve forged a strong working relationship with this client:

• We've made BMG less dependent on expensive and limited software products in the music industry
• We've helped BMG offer better services to their clients
• BMG has been able to respond better and faster to customer requests
• They've been able to stabilize the environments & applications
• They have gone on to adopt many of our agile methods and work more efficiently internally across their IT function.