An app makeover for hollywood success

WeGet Artists/Music Supervisor Inc., a music licensing company, hired Kodius to upgrade and modernize their Music Supervisor application.

After conducting a large-scale refactoring, our team has continued to support the client with maintenance and the integration of new features that are benefiting some of the biggest Hollywood studios.

Two Screens of Music Supervisor Website.

Two screens displaying the We Get Artist's Music Supervisor desktop app

About Music Supervisor

The rising star of the Hollywood music industry

Over the last seventeen years, the company has licensed thousands of songs for hundreds of projects. In fact, almost every major film company and TV show has licensed music from the company using their music licensing platform, Music Supervisor.

The platform has over 300,000 tracks created by over 60,000 artists.

Currently, every 48 hours a piece of music is placed into a project.

A woman playing guitar with her eyes closed, focused on the music

How the collaboration started

Client’s urgency is our emergency

When Ruby on Rails went through an 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 found Kodius to jump in his place.

A man with headphones working on his laptop.

Los Angeles - Zagreb

Although WeGet Artists/Music Supervisor is from Los Angeles and Kodius is based in Zagreb, we never had a time zone problem.

Working together has always been smooth, and we always share a good laugh and a good joke. It’s said that laughter always shortens distances.

Our work on the application

Go rails or go home

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 After the malfunctions were noticed, due to out-of-date code, the client chose not to rewrite the platform from scratch with some XY stack - which was a smart move.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.

They could not just lose money but also a lot of time, and its Hollywood clients certainly didn’t have time to wait. Their decision was to stick with Rails and let us upgrade it.

Rails is still of the most popular stacks. Many world-famous sites use it: Airbnb, Twitter, Shopify, Hulu, GitHub, and many more.

Some Work We’ve Done Since 2019

01

Upgrading
the application

Our developers helped get the application back up and running as quickly as possible. We also helped plan out a complete site rebuild while keeping some of the broken pieces together.

A screenshot of Music Supervisor desktop app, displaying a chart of how royalties are paid out on the right and the pass landing page on the left.

02

Hosting

We helped the client migrate to our hosting platform “Milivoj”, since they weren’t very satisfied with their previous hosting provider.

The whole migration process was hassle free for the client, with minimal application downtime. Their hosting bills are now 5x lower than they were with their previous host, and we provided them with a safe space and impeccable customer service, ensuring that everything runs smoothly and fast.

03

Tracking the statistics

We developed an advanced statistics tracking system that shows how many times each song has been searched, listened to by music supervisors or purchased for projects.

A black and white photograph of a man playing a guitar, the focus is on his hands as they strum the strings of the guitar

04

We get artists

We helped the client develop a platform where musicians can upload their music to showcase their works and eventually get their music placed in a film or series.

Developing the application took about 3 months, and then we added new features for 6 months.

With "We Get Artists," every month 10 000–15 000 tracks get pitched.

05

Payment solution

We rewrote the “payment solution” system because fixing bugs was not the best solution.

A screenshot of Music Supervisor desktop app, displaying a list of albums and compilations on the left and a list of active tracks on the right, allowing users to browse and manage music library.

06

And now...

Now, we conduct updates, fix bugs, and add a lot of new functionalities to the backend.

We have weekly scrum calls with the client via Zoom. They also meet once a week with our bug testing group to go over reports, fixes, and everything else.

The Results

With newfound energy music supervisor is thriving in Hollywood

With our development expertise, the Music Supervisor application has been fixed, upgraded, and modernized and is ready to reach new heights.

Thanks to our help, Music Supervisor is still in business, helping music supervisors from studios like Netflix, HBO, Universal, AMC, Warner Bros., Disney, Discovery Channel, 20th Century Fox and Sony Pictures find music and artists.

And their numbers have never been better:

A black and white photograph of a man playing a guitar, the focus is on the man's facial expression and body posture as he plays the instrument.

When we started...

297 455

songs uploaded

16 200

users

Now there are more than...

400000+

songs uploaded

25000+

users

BARRY COFFING

CEO & Founder at Music Supervisor

“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.”

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