Scenario

The record company Monster Records & Associates (referred to as MRA) has struggled to cope with the changes in the music industry. With new leadership at MRA, the way the company is perceived is changing. Record companies, including MRA are no longer in the business of running recording studios, CDs and vinyl presses, or helping artists become media friendly. They are digital companies and their assets are largely data. Today, the majority of MRA's revenue comes directly through downloads and streaming, both directly from MRA and via Amazon, Spotify, and other services. Significant revenue also comes in from other means such as licensing music to television, films, podcasts, radio, and advertising.

Modern recording deals with artists look more like agreements to lease the right to use a recording or composition. This at least in part has come from the fact an artist or composer doesn't necessarily need big budgets for expensive studios such as Abbey Road. In fact, if an artist wanted, they could do everything themselves. More innovative record companies are starting to offer services to artists in an à la carte model—from just building and maintaining an artist's website, or provision of physical media production and distribution, to supplying streaming services with media, through to the traditional full end picture covering finance, marketing, distribution and touring.

Manufacturing of physical media, even with the resurgence of vinyl, is done by 3^rd party presses because the volumes are often too small to make it cost effective for MRA to own their own traditional high-volume manufacturing plant. MRA see their role as having the expertise to manage all the different processes in the distribution of the artist's media. Managing all the legal agreements from recording copyright, licensing agreements for commercial use, to touring and merchandising processes in what have become known as 360° agreements.

Artists can sign deals with record companies that may be global or restricted to regions or countries. This makes the data and the management of it rather complex. This complexity can be further compounded by the fact that a record company like MRA can effectively subcontract or sell their rights onto another company (or buy the rights) for to handle part or all of an artist's requirements.

MRA have elected to take cautious approach to the transition to a new digital business model. As such an approach represents a perceived significant risk to the business and the cost to transform their IT landscape is significant. The risks are seen from a number of perspectives-how the change may be received by the recording artists. The risk in the possibility of disrupting current revenue streams-while contracting are well understood, through making a large capital investment in the IT transformation draining financial reserves which may be needed to sustain the company until the next major success in terms of an artist recording creating a surge in revenue. As a result, MRA have determined that they should develop a high-level strategy, roadmap and a target state that means that they can gain the most revenue from their assets (that is, data) while providing the relationship and engagement of artists that have kept MRA's reputation as a company that cares about the art.

The first steps in the process has been to understand their data assets, where they exist in the current landscape and determine how to best leverage the data. MRA believes its data assets are:

• Digital audio recordings (and older physical media)
• Sales data, particularly over time as it provides insights into which trends and styles best sell and where
• Buyer insight-through the capture of information through artists websites, MRA have not only a list of potential direct sales opportunities, but also sufficient means to build profiles of their customer base to both understand the kind of music to offer but also the most effective channels to reach the consumers
• Contracts, particularly with artists which allow MRA to understand how they should relate to their artists, and how and where they can sell their works

Given that MRA want to start cautiously, it was determined that they should choose a couple of use cases that had core value to the business and a broad range of internal, partner and pure digital opportunities. The internal and partner opportunities particularly need to either reduce costs or directly improve revenue. As part of this the company have identified a couple of pilot projects that would meet these criteria.