Sunnyvale, Calif., January 21, 2021 – Google Cloud today announced that BMG, one of the world's largest music companies and a subsidiary of international media giant Bertelsmann, has selected Google Cloud to build a scalable, global infrastructure as it grows its digital music business and forges new revenue streams.

The music industry is rapidly changing, with streaming now accounting for 56% of all sales globally, while physical sales continue to decline, according to the IFPI’s Global Music Report 2019. This fundamental shift to digital means that the volume of data that BMG now manages has grown exponentially, with streaming generating 1,500-2,000x the number of transactions compared to physical albums.

To pay its artists, songwriters and other rights holders, BMG must process the billions of lines of income it receives from around the world—across platforms, streaming services, radio, television and many other sources. Now, with Google Cloud’s BigQuery, a serverless enterprise data warehouse and Dataproc, an open source data and analytics processing solution, BMG can easily add or delete computing resources to quickly scale its royalty processing, ensuring accurate and timely payment of artist royalties, while also reducing overall operating costs. 

As part of its infrastructure migration, BMG is shifting 1,500 components, servers, and databases to Google Cloud. With its modeling data in Google Cloud, BMG can then more easily explore previous data points such as popularity of certain downloads among device types and ultimately discover new revenue opportunities. In addition, as Google Cloud’s technology has been architected with the highest level of security from the ground up, data protection and privacy are provided through technological measures and a legal framework, to ensure that BMG’s data is fully protected.

“BMG is at its heart a service company for artists and songwriters, and we are constantly optimizing our business to improve that service and deliver it more efficiently. With the move to Google Cloud, we can now tap into relevant data across the music lifecycle with smarter analytics tools, to benefit our artist and songwriter clients,” said Gaurav Mittal, Vice President, Group Technology, BMG.

"The rise in digital media means that content companies have to place an increasing importance in data and analytics. We’re thrilled to work with BMG and are looking forward to collaborating on the innovative ways our data-driven solutions can help the company drive new revenue streams and scale its business,” said Anil Jain, Managing Director, Media & Entertainment, Industry Solutions, Google Cloud. 

Recently, BMG has started leveraging Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to better serve its artists and songwriter clients with more effective marketing campaigns—and to help its media customers more easily discover the right music for commercials, films, and television.