Customer Success Story : Idol

Who is IDOL?

Founded in 2006, IDOL is a digital music distributor, following an exclusive selective approach. The company offers a high level of marketing resources and personalized attention to its artist and label partners. This notably includes focused expertise on digital revenue optimization, community management coaching, campaign coordination, physical distribution, and many other services. IDOL’s label partners include prestigious names such as Erased Tapes, Glitterbeat, Godmode, Grand Management, HighNote, InFiné, No Format, Proper Music Group, Record Makers, and SRD to name a few.

IDOL Tech Services is a subsidiary of IDOL, which provides content owners and distributors with a white-label application and an API, enabling them to handle all their digital distribution operations. Its distribution platform centralizes catalog management and content delivery, as well as a sales reporting tool and modern analytics dashboards. IDOL Tech Services works with some of the key indie companies in the world such as [PIAS], Because, Concord Music Group, Ditto Music, Kompakt, and more.

IDOL is a recommended delivery partner by Spotify, Apple, and the Merlin Network.

The company is fully owned and run by its founders, with no investors or major company funding. The IDOL group has built a very autonomous and sustainable model around its aim to be the best independent digital partner, providing the highest quality of service to independent producers, labels, and distributors. IDOL is a global company headquartered in Paris, with offices in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Nashville, and Johannesburg.

Their Project

As an independent digital music distributor, IDOL distributes music across major international platforms such as Youtube, Apple Music, and Spotify, as well as to thousands of DSP endpoints including regional services like Tencent, Anghami, or even PROs, TelCos, and aggregators such as 7digital.

IDOL ensures that music is discovered by the widest audience possible. As a result, they have put in place a strong, reputable editorial line as well as rich and state-of-the-art metadata sets, enabling music service algorithms to find the right listener and suggest one song rather than another.

In addition, the company also drives targeted marketing actions according to the performance of several songs. IDOL Retail Marketing teams work hand-in-hand with editorial and content marketing teams at DSPs to make sure the artists and music it represents get the best exposure and support possible for the services.

IDOL were early adopters of Dedicated Servers at Online.net. Their satisfaction with the level of service and the reliability of the servers was such that it allowed them to take the time to migrate to a powerful and cost-effective cloud offer. The dimension of their growth in recent years brought about the need to progressively make their infrastructure more scalable and multi-cloud. Today, they are clients of Google Cloud Platform, Scaleway Elements, and Scaleway Dedibox.

The multi-cloud approach is very interesting to the company for redundancy purposes. Furthermore, the APIs for certain products, such as Kubernetes, are the same at Scaleway and GCP, which makes it very practical when an edit needs to be made. Deployments are performed simultaneously across all platforms, without the need to rewrite any code.

Jean-Phillipe Lecaille, CTO of IDOL also confided that “As we have a large amount of data to transport, GCP can be efficient, as well, since they are implemented everywhere. Indeed, it allows us to have Availability Zones close to where we need to get or deliver the music”.

Their Solution

Thanks to Scaleway’s maturity and reliability, they decided to start migrating their infrastructure to Scaleway Elements. They currently use DEV and GP instances, Database, and the Snapshot feature to backup their Kubernetes volumes. They also use Object Storage to store several terabytes of assets.

In order to consume, store, and send a large amount of data, IDOL developed its own infrastructure and APIs. In addition, IDOL uses Redis, Sphinx, and Memcached as their Database. They also use CloudRun to run their code without provisioning or managing their servers. Bare Metal Cloud Instances are used as test machines.

A Technical Point of View

IDOL is using Git as the source of truth. As a result, all their infrastructure is described in a Git repository from which they operate almost everything (version control, history, peer review, rollback…etc).

When they push an operational change into Git, such as allowing more storage to Memcache or adding Redis servers, it launches a build into Google Cloud Build which will gather the sources and execute a sequence of infinite steps. According to the request, it will then trigger an action directly on their Kubernetes Server at Scaleway such as configuring a new daemon or a Postgres instance. IDOL does not intervene directly on Scaleway or Google servers.

Scaleway’s Asset

Even though IDOL is expecting new offers such as more managed services, monitoring features, messaging systems, or the very near end of storage limitations, they are very satisfied with Scaleway Dedibox and Scaleway Elements: “As early adopters of Dedibox dedicated servers, we closely followed Scaleway’s development. We’re very happy with the service, the privileged relationships with the teams, and the availability of the assistance” adds Jean-Phillipe Lecaille.

According to IDOL, another strong advantage of Scaleway is that they are a well-founded traditional hosting provider as well as a reliable cloud provider. It enables very short network routes allowing for fast migration while keeping their service in production.