Upgrading the application
Getting the application back up and running came first. From there, a complete site rebuild was planned out — while the broken pieces were held together along the way.
The site went down — and the original developer was gone
WeGet Artists / Music Supervisor Inc. runs the platform some of the biggest Hollywood studios use to source music. When a major Rails upgrade took the site down, the developer who originally built it was unavailable — so Kodius stepped in to get it back up, and has run it since.
Production down · original developer unreachable
Product · Music licensing platform
Inside the Music Supervisor platform
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.
About Music Supervisor
Music licensing used across Hollywood studios
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.
How the collaboration started
The site went down — we picked it up that week
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.
Since the programmer was busy at the time and couldn’t help, he pointed them to Kodius to jump in his place.
Working relationship
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.
Approach
Upgrade Rails, not rewrite the platform
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After the malfunctions were noticed, due to out-of-date code, the client chose not to rewrite the platform from scratch with some other stack — which was a smart move.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 upgrade it rather than start over.
Rails is still one of the most popular stacks. World-famous sites use it: Airbnb, Shopify, GitHub, and many more.
Production stack
Ruby on Rails PostgreSQL Sidekiq Milivoj hosting
The work
Six chapters of work on a Hollywood platform
From an emergency Rails upgrade to ongoing maintenance, payment rewrites, and new features — the stack that keeps Music Supervisor moving.
Hosting that scales
After the client grew dissatisfied with their previous provider, the platform moved to Milivoj, the Kodius hosting platform.
Hassle-free migration, minimal downtime, hosting bills 5× lower — on safer infrastructure that keeps everything running fast.
Tracking the statistics
An advanced statistics-tracking system now shows how many times each song has been searched, listened to by music supervisors, or purchased for projects.
We Get Artists
We Get Artists gives musicians a place to upload their music, showcase their work — and eventually get their tracks placed in a film or series.
Through “We Get Artists”, 10,000–15,000 tracks get pitched every month.
05
Payment solution
The payment-solution system was rewritten from the ground up, once patching bugs in the existing one stopped being the best path forward. Every cleared placement now settles cleanly through the new pipeline.
And now…
Updates, bug fixes, and new backend functionality still ship on a steady cadence — weekly scrum calls, weekly QA review, every Friday a demo.
By the numbers
From rescue to steady growth
400 000+
Songs uploaded now
From 297 455 at start
25 000+
Active users now
From 16 200 at start
Testimonial
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.
You've lost the team that built it.
Other clients we’ve helped through the same trigger.
