Getmusic Australia

Getmusic.com.au is a direct-to-consumer store, offering CDs, MP3s, DVDs, apparel and marchandise from Universal Music Group, Warner, EMI, Sony and a range of independent labels. At close to two million SKUs, hundreds of thousands of MP3 streams and multiple realtime mobile APIs, Getmusic provided some unique data challenges.

In addition to the huge portal, close to a hundred artist sites, many with commerce functionality and all drawing content from the main Getmusic hub, make up the Getmusic platform.

The Getmusic site can also be white-labeled to provide partners with the ability to offer their own customers direct access to Getmusic’s content and commerce capabilties. A highly customizable theming engine can dynamically switch in and out logos, layouts, branding and content.

At its foundation, Getmusic is powered by the Microgroove Music Platform. However, a substantial amount of custom development was required for project specific functionality. The limits of what was possible with SQL and tradidtional database techniques were pushed and several key systems rely on No-SQL solutions (e.g. map/reduce backed by a schemaless datastore), particularly in the charting and tracking areas of the site.

Client-side performance was also a major component of the project, given the range of options and number of products available to the consumer at any one moment. The Microgroove Music Platform was already CDN-aware, placing content on geographically dispers nodes. Additionally, development-time tools were used to constantly inspect client-side performance and combine & minify libraries at every opportunity.