An app makeover for Hollywood success
WeGet Artists / Music Supervisor Inc., a music licensing company, hired Kodius to upgrade and modernize their Music Supervisor application — the platform some of the biggest Hollywood studios use to source music.
The rising star of the Hollywood music industry
Over the last seventeen years, the company has licensed thousands of songs for hundreds of projects. Almost every major film company and TV show has licensed music through their platform, Music Supervisor.
The platform hosts over 300,000 tracks from more than 60,000 artists.
Currently, every 48 hours a piece of music is placed into a project.
The client’s urgency is our emergency
When Ruby on Rails went through a major update, the whole Music Supervisor site went down. It needed an urgent update to a newer version.
The client contacted the programmer who had originally built the Music Supervisor platform. Since the programmer was busy at the time and couldn’t help, he pointed them to Kodius to jump in his place.
Los Angeles — Zagreb
Although WeGet Artists / Music Supervisor is based in Los Angeles and Kodius is in Zagreb, the time zone has never been a problem.
Working together has always been smooth — and we always share a good laugh. Laughter, as they say, shortens distances.
Go Rails, or go home
The Music Supervisor platform is built with Ruby on Rails.
After the malfunctions were noticed, due to out-of-date code, the client chose not to rewrite the platform from scratch with some other stack — which was a smart move.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll see better results by migrating to another stack than by upgrading Ruby on Rails.
The client could lose not just money but a lot of time — and their Hollywood clients certainly didn’t have time to wait. The decision was to stick with Rails and let us upgrade it.
Rails is still one of the most popular stacks. Many world-famous sites use it: Airbnb, Twitter, Shopify, Hulu, GitHub, and many more.
Six chapters of work on a Hollywood platform
From an emergency Rails upgrade to ongoing maintenance, payment rewrites, and new features — here’s the stack we use to keep Music Supervisor moving.
Upgrading the application
Our developers helped get the application back up and running as quickly as possible. We also helped plan out a complete site rebuild while keeping the broken pieces together along the way.
Hosting
We helped the client migrate to our hosting platform, Milivoj, after they became dissatisfied with their previous provider.
The migration was hassle-free for the client, with minimal downtime. Their hosting bills are now 5× lower than before, with safer infrastructure and impeccable customer service so everything runs smoothly and fast.
Tracking the statistics
We built an advanced statistics-tracking system that shows how many times each song has been searched, listened to by music supervisors, or purchased for projects.
We Get Artists
We helped the client develop a platform where musicians can upload their music to showcase their work — and eventually get their tracks placed in a film or series.
Building the application took about three months, and we added new features for six months afterward.
With “We Get Artists”, 10,000–15,000 tracks get pitched every month.
Payment solution
We rewrote the payment-solution system because fixing bugs in the existing one was no longer the best path forward.
And now…
We continue to ship updates, fix bugs, and add new functionality to the backend.
We hold weekly scrum calls with the client via Zoom. They also meet once a week with our QA group to review reports, fixes, and everything in between.
Thriving in Hollywood
With our development expertise, the Music Supervisor application has been fixed, upgraded, and modernized — ready to reach new heights.
Thanks to our help, Music Supervisor is still in business, helping music supervisors at studios like Netflix, HBO, Universal, AMC, Warner Bros., Disney, Discovery Channel, 20th Century Fox, and Sony Pictures find music and artists.
And the numbers have never been better.
From rescue to steady growth
Kodius saved the day!!! We lost our Ruby programmer right as our code needed to be updated. Our entire site went down and we were out of business. I reached out to Kodius and we set up a quick call and they agreed to jump in and help us. They got the site back up and completed the update within a few days. When it came time to switch the servers, their CEO Kresimir got up at 4am over the weekend to personally do the switch himself.
