Reece Donovan

At the vanguard of the digital streaming age

In 2011 SONY Music's VP of Global Technology, Hans, foresaw the coming age of digital streaming and enacted the development of a system to handle the processing associated with this new frontier. As a result, PreProc was well-established by the time the streaming age truly arrived. This meant that profits from these new revenue streams were being delivered back to the artists at a world-leading pace.

In the initial stages, programming the application presented many tough challenges. The functionality being requested was visionary and this resulted in requests of functionality that no UI framework could yet provide. We had to invent and innovate in order to deliver on the vision. The ExtJS3 framework was extended heavily with our custom created components - inline grid filtering, infinite grid scroll paging, framework plugins for uniform cross-browser functionalities, custom form controls and custom renderers. Some of these became integrated in the base framework many years later, but many remain in place today (as robust as ever!). PreProc is still being developed today and continues to push the boundaries of what is possible with exciting new functionalities.

So what does the application do exactly? PreProc takes in the reported usage of SONY Music's catalogue from hundreds of digital streaming platforms. This reported data often contains incomplete, irrelevant or ambiguous information. It's PreProc's job link these reported records to real records in Sony’s catalogue so that they can be correctly charged for. If it can't be done automatically, a user is required to make these links through the PreProc interface. Click, search, link - simple! Once linked, revenues that would have once been lost due to poor reporting are now recouped and delivered back to the artist.

PreProc also provides extensive auditing capabilities - including a stand-alone application for external auditors. All available data can be queried in meaningful ways in order to give the auditor insight into the causes of unexpected or under-performing products or service providers.