Release Consulting, an independent IT consultancy specialising in the music and entertainment industries, has this week finalised an agreement with Universal Music Group (UMG) to service its international IT digital initiatives department.
In fact, the new specialist outsourcer was spun out of Universal in February this year by its founding MD, Will Lovegrove. The ambition now, he says, is to build out into new areas from the foundation stone of music-giant expertise that he and his team have acquired.
“I was working inside Universal for five years and built what I thought was a very high-performing technology team in a media company and we've taken that team out and formed a consultancy. Our ambition is to carry on doing what we were doing for Universal but for other similar types of company. Obviously other music labels spring to mind, but also broadcasting companies and publishing companies as well.”
Release Consulting says that it offers entertainment companies the opportunity to benefit from the IT expertise behind the systems that enable Universal's international digital supply chain.
However, the real core of the new company's business is not entertainment or the media, necessarily, but intellectual- property-based organisations of all kinds, and how they digitise their assets and manage them.
“We were involved in setting up the IT systems, workflows and processes to help Universal exploit its digital audio archives,” says Lovegrove.
“So [such assets might be] sitting over here in an archive system surrounded by metadata designed for a specific purpose, but they perhaps need to be over there instead, so new metadata needs to be written, and then the material needs to be sent out over corporate systems. At the end of that process is consuming the material in an online form in an online channel by retailers or consumers.
That process and that learning and expertise that we've developed, I think could be applied to broadcasters and publishers as well, where intellectual property is at the heart of that process. ”
For many organisations, those archives may date back decades, perhaps? “Yep, absolutely,” says Lovegrove. “We understand archives, we understand incomplete data. We understand that data collected a number of years ago may not have all the things a company needs to do things with it in today's age. So we understand a lot of the issues and complexities of companies that deal with intellectual property."
In fact, Lovegrove's business is in many ways a traditional IT outsourcing one: “On the practical side, we understand international media companies, we understand how projects are governed with multiple stakeholders in multiple countries – with language barriers and time barriers,” he says.
“On that very pragmatic basis we understand how projects can work in international environments, in large companies. Where I see those kinds of indicators then I see where we can add value and have a meaningful conversation.”
Of course, broadcasters are ahead of the game in the UK, with the BBC's iPlayer and its plans announced this week to digitise its entire archive, or at least create a webpage for every programme ever broadcast.
“What happened to music five years ago is now happening to other vertical sectors today,” agrees Lovegrove. “They are making advances and tackling issues such as making their archives available and deciding whether to use their own software or other people's software, and which stage in the value chain do they want to occupy and what does that mean for their own internal resources and how they change and adapt and evolve.”
For Lovegrove, though, these conversations should happen internally before Release is called in. “What I've seen with companies that deal in intellectual property is that they are investigating as many different strategies as they can. Strategic business planning is not one of our billable services.”
Music, cinema/video and broadcasting are three industries that are being rewritten by the day by Internet-based businesses, from the original Napster – which, aside from all the noise about piracy, arguably proved both the business model and the market of online music distribution and saved the industry billions of dollars in R&D – to YouTube, Bebo, Amiestreet.com and MySpace.
Does Lovegrove have any bets of his own about what business model might succeed? “My opinions are as a consumer. I get involved where by and large a company has already set out its strategy and they want it executed.
For myself as a consumer, I like and want subscription services to prosper. I worry about advertising based services... I understand how they might work with very established, very famous high-profile stars, but the music business is also about nurturing new talent and I don't see how they would get a share of the revenue stream from advertising, when the media buyers don't understand who they are and what they do.”
For Lovegrove, then, his business is not about how innovative the strategy might be – that is down to the customer – but instead about making it work. “That is the real challenge. However innovative your business model, your back office systems must be geared to operate in a certain way. There's innovation in business models in the front office, but being able to to fulfil those is where I tend to be involved.... and how you relate those innovative ideas to a major [label].”
So the media companies may be hedging their bets up front, but Lovegrove's money is invested in the thing that never changes: the backroom; the real engine of any business.