Universal Music Group is the largest music company in the world. The multi-corporation owns and operates a wide range of companies in more than 60 countries.
In addition, Universal Music Group employs over 8,300 people worldwide and has around 890 of the most famous artists such as Lady Gaga, Elton John and The Beatles under contract.
Universal Music Group has hundreds of online shops - there is an individual shop for each artist. In the past, these were managed by individual labels with different shop systems. Universal Music Group therefore wanted to standardise its e-commerce systems and ensure central administration in a backend for all shops of all artists and labels.
The requirement was to create hundreds of Magento shops in the shortest possible time, all of which could be managed centrally but independently of each other. In addition, they all needed to have individual product catalogues and designs and be scalable to cope with sudden high traffic due to artist promotions. It is also crucial that all these webshops can be deployed, launched, designed and managed by people without technical knowledge.
This turned out to be the perfect use case for the blugento shop factory and the blugento design customiser.
Netresearch joined a team led by 47B to collaborate on the project and provide Universal Music Group with an independent instance of blugento shop factory, allowing them to create and manage any number of Magento shops.
Each shop is an independent single shop instance running on its own cloud infrastructure with the architecture designed by Netresearch. This is set up to be robust and scalable. This made it possible to migrate the existing Magento stores and create new ones literally at the click of a button!
There is a 'master shop' template that contains all the basic requirements that each shop uses, such as product catalogue, chart reporting, analytics and sales information. This basic template is used to create all shops and can be customised to include specific requirements for each artist.
Each shop also comes with our Magento Design Customiser, a tool that allows non-technical people to design and customise any Magento shop to fit their brand quickly and easily - all from the Magento admin dashboard.
Since Universal Music Group has been using the blugento shop factory, over 175 Magento enterprise stores have been created and rolled out with the system. We are constantly working together to improve the design customiser and its functional extension, as well as providing support for the infrastructure and Magento.
Together with Universal Music Group, Netresearch won the Magento Imagine Excellence Award in the "Best Sales Channel Growth" category at Magento Imagine 2019. We had already been nominated for the same project in the "Best-in-Class Fulfilment" category a year earlier. This shows that we have been scoring points with our blugento shop factory solution for a long time.
Netresearch wins the Magento Imagine Excellence Award
Rapper & music producer J. Cole
Biggest shop launch at Universal Music Group
In spring 2018, rapper and music producer J. Cole's shop was the biggest launch in the UMG shop factory infrastructure to date. He also released an album at the same time. The launch had to be realised within a few days. In addition to the short time frame, the challenge here was the external code. The Magento shop with all its adaptations and extensions could no longer be checked and optimised by us. Thanks to the shop factory and the existing shop template, which contained all the necessary customisations and extensions for UMG, the shop was ready for use within a few minutes. And thanks to the integrated design customiser in Magento, the UMG editors were able to quickly adapt the design to their requirements.
In addition, the loading time of the page should always be less than 3 seconds, even under the extreme load to be expected, even if the accesses exceed the estimated 30,000 simultaneous connections. Due to the small time window and the tight requirements for the launch, we opted for the sledgehammer method: put the entire system under extreme load and look at the components that fail first.
The result was that, even in the worst case, we almost never exceeded a response time of 2 seconds and the occurrence of error pages was in the unmeasurable range. We were therefore able to fulfil all of UMG's requirements.
Just minutes before going live, the ElastiCache instance failed. Fortunately, we were able to quickly switch to the second ElastiCache, which had already been prepared as a standby.
In the end, the setup had to cope with the following accesses after going live:
up to 586,000 requests per minute in the CDN
up to 25,000 requests on the backend
45,000 requests/responses on the ELBs
up to 1,600 requests per minute per instance
All in all, it was a successful and informative launch for UMG and us, especially considering the time factor and the special requirements.
