Universal Music Group

Universal Music Group has hundreds of online-shops for their worldwide roster of artists. In the past, these were managed by individual labels each using various shop systems. Universal Music Group wanted to standardise their e-commerce properties and systems and provide central oversight of all stores across all artists and labels. 

The requirement was to provide the ability to create Magento shops within the shortest time possible that could all be managed centrally but be independent from each other, have individual product catalogues and designs, be scalable to cope with sudden high traffic resulting from artists promotions, and crucially, that all these stores could be deployed, launched, designed and managed by people without any technical skills. 

Turns out this was the perfect use case for the blugento shop factory and the blugento design customiser.

Netresearch joined a team headed up by 47B to collaborate in the project to provide Universal Music Group  with an independent instance of blugento shop factory allowing them to create and manage any number of Magento shops. 

Every shop is an independent single shop instance running on their own cloud infrastructure with the architecture designed by Netresearch. This is set up to be robust and scalable. This made it possible to migrate their existing Magento stores and create new ones literally at the click of a button.

There is one ‘Master Shop’ template that contains all the base requirements that each shop utilises, such as product catalogue, chart reporting, analytics and sales information, and this base template is used to create all stores and can be adjusted to incorporate specific requirements for each artist. 

Each shop also includes our Magento Design Customiser which is a tool that allows non-technical people to design and theme any Magento store to match their brand quickly and easily all from the Magento administration dashboard.

Since Universal Music Group started utilizing blugento shop factory, they have migrated and created over 175 Magento Enterprise stores using the system. 

We continue to work together to enhance the design customiser and its functional expansion as well as provide support for 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. For the same project we were nominated one year earlier in the category "Best in Class Fulfillment". This shows that we have been able to score points with our solution blugento shop factory for a long time.

In spring 2018, the shop of rapper and music producer J. Cole saw the largest launch in the UMG shop factory infrastructure to date. At the same time there was an album release from him. The launch was planned to be completed within a few days. In addition to the short period of time, the external code provided an additional challenge. The Magento shop with all its configurations and extensions could no longer be checked and optimized by us. Thanks to the shop factory and the existing shop template, which contained all the necessary settings and extensions for UMG, the shop was ready for use within a few minutes. And thanks to the integrated design customizer in Magento, the UMG editors were able to quickly adapt the design according to their wishes.

In addition, the loading time of the page should always be less than 3 seconds, even under the extreme expected load, and even if site accesses exceed the estimated 30,000 simultaneous connections. Due to the small time window and the tight requirements for the launch, we went ahead with the sledgehammer approach: cause extreme load on the entire system and see which components fail first.

The following optimizations resulted:

The result was that, even in the worst case, we almost never got a response time of more than 2 seconds, and the occurrence of error pages was in the unmeasurable range. We were thus able to meet all UMG requirements.

The ElastiCache instance failed just minutes before going live. Fortunately, a quick switch to the second ElastiCache, which was already prepared as a stand-by, was possible.

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

Overall, it was a successful and insightful launch for UMG and for us, especially considering the time factor and the strict requirements.