AllMusic  · intuitive music discovery

AllMusic Publishing supplied music for commercials, films and television. Its customers often arrived with a scene in mind and no useful search term. From 2016 to 2022, I built and ran the website and its back office, Marsyas. I worked solo on those interfaces, with another developer contributing to the backend.

Smooth and satisfying UX all around

We introduced a playful search using colliding bubbles, trying to tackle a problem of searching the massive database of music where most of the results never got presented to anyone, because most customers just queried standard things like “Guitar chill“, “Upbeat piano“ etc; but the spectrum of library music has infinite corners that can’t be captured in those standard search terms. I implemented the colliding bubbles in D3.js.

This turned out a big success. We proceeded making the entire website a blissful experience to browse around alltogether. Frequent visitors learned all the keyboard controls that could be used to navigate the site quickly and they ended up spending entire days on it.

Technical challenges / architecture cleanup

We had to modernize a lot of the automation that was old and ran on Microsoft based databases and languages. The old code was a pile of spaghetti code that somehow worked, and connected all of the music rights organizations from various countries for reporting, music usage tracking + Harvest royalty platform; but it was messy and felt like a house of cards. We step by step replaced every part of those processes by singular Lambda functions on AWS.

These Lambda functions had requirements that exceeded normal cloud function limitations; we had to support long running file transfers of huge file archives, archive them on the fly, connect a whole bunch of third party (sometimes unreliable) apis that still had to work in harmony and flawlessly.

By the end, we had the most high-tech architecture of any library music publisher of the Benelux, probably of Europe and possibly of the entire world at that point. This entire music industry was and still is very dusty; one music rights organization still ran their backend on IBM System/360 Model 30 mainframes from 1967 (using punchcards and tape drives). Integrating with that was oftentimes a headache but just the more satisfying once we managed to make it work.

I also built InspireMe, an app where the publisher’s weekly digest came as named sets with a mood and a photograph. It offered another way into the catalogue for recurring customers.

The work behind the catalogue

Marsyas let staff upload albums, tag tracks, manage contracts and see what customers had been listening to. It also processed royalty files from collecting societies, matched payments to songs and prepared statements for composers. Unmatched receipts went to a person to resolve.