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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
February 13, 2008
TuneCore: The Technology Behind The Model-Changing Music Business Operation
Ruby On Rails Drives Virtual Servers To Automate Scalable Upload Systems Via S3
TuneCore – the rule-changing digital delivery service – has also assembled a groundbreaking technical infrastructure. TuneCore has facilitated a model shift in the music industry, allowing universal access to digital distribution for the first time in history. Here's a look behind the scenes at how the Brooklyn-based company's technology operates.
TuneCore's business involves moving customer-uploaded audio files across a wide variety of formats, from WAV or lossless, to Windows Media, FLAC and MP3. No other company accomplishes this operation with such speed, accuracy and
scalability.
TuneCore customers' uploaded music is converted using open-source codecs in
a custom Ruby application, and then the audio is transferred in bulk to the relevant digital stores. The automated system handles a wide range of music formats and XML schemas for metadata, with modifications for each store's particular needs. TuneCore's transcoding software is called Petri. The system went live in September '07 and has been continually extended and modified since.
TuneCore uses a combination of over 100 virtual servers plus physical servers to process several thousand music files every day, without building and maintaining a large infrastructure of worker machines. The website itself is housed on physical servers at their ISP, but the heavy lifting of music and artwork uploading, storage, retrieval and transcoding is entirely handled with virtual servers on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). More virtual servers are launched as needed to cope with any level of load. This approach, along with using Amazon's S3 service for music file storage, means that TuneCore is effectively scalable up to many times its current traffic without any re-architecting of its systems, a remarkable feat. The only bottleneck remaining is the ability of stores to ingest the data - TuneCore can process 10,000 albums in a day as easily as 100. It has allowed TuneCore to significantly improve processing speed and agility to handle unusual requests from its distribution partners.
TuneCore's SSL-protected accounting system handles data from all digital download stores and makes it available for the customer, who can get paid via a check or PayPal transfer. TuneCore's customers can view album sales by month or by title in detail down to their individual countries and streams, withdraw money or use it to deliver new albums. It has proved accurate enough to correct errors by other labels and services.
TuneCore.com, the new music delivery and distribution service has changed the 100-year-old rules and model of the music business. It is a low, flat fee service that delivers anyone's music to iTunes, eMusic, Rhapsody and many other major download sites while taking no rights and no revenue from the sale of the music. TuneCore's fees are simply based upon the number songs delivered and the number of digital retailers to whom it will be delivered.
