Kobalt Music speeds royalty payments with Oracle AI Database@AWS
Music rights publisher runs Oracle Exadata Database Service natively on AWS for high performance, scalability, and resiliency with lower TCO.
United States | Media and Entertainment
“Technology plays a critical role in managing the complexity of digital music rights management, ensuring fast and accurate payments whilst delivering greater transparency and value to creators. With Oracle AI Database@AWS, we can continue evolving our digital platform on a high performance foundation that supports our growth and enables us to empower our clients with greater speed and efficiency.”
Kobalt empowers artists with essential royalty payments
Kobalt Music Group has built one of the music industry’s most sophisticated technology platforms for handling administration for millions of songs, processing online and offline consumption data and distributing royalties to songwriters, publishers, and performing artists. On average, Kobalt represents more than 35% of the top 100 songs and albums in the US and the UK.
Founded in 2000, Kobalt helped reshape music rights management by developing technology that gives creators clearer information about royalties while allowing them to retain ownership of their copyrights. Through its acquisition of the American Mechanical Rights Agency, Kobalt expanded into global streaming royalty collection, supporting direct licensing with major streaming providers such as Apple Music and Spotify. The company has since processed billions of dollars in royalties.
As Kobalt continued to expand its platform, the company wanted its database architecture to better align with the rest of its AWS-centered technology estate. Its royalty platform evolved from Oracle Exadata on-premises to Oracle Exadata Database Service on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
After three years running Oracle Exadata Database Service on OCI, the next step was to move the platform closer to AWS-hosted applications without sacrificing the performance, availability, and resilience it depended on. This step would support further growth, enabling Kobalt to process and distribute billions of dollars in royalties per year.
Oracle and AWS multicloud solution simplifies operations for growth
Initially, Kobalt considered a full database replatforming effort, but this would have introduced cost, complexity, and risk. Oracle AI Database@AWS gave Kobalt a simplified multicloud architecture. This provided a way to bring its essential Oracle AI Database workloads closer to its AWS application tier while preserving the high performance and scalability characteristics of Exadata with minimal changes. The company could continue running Oracle AI Database on Oracle Exadata Database Service on Dedicated Infrastructure in AWS for ultra-low latency next to the AWS-hosted applications that support its royalty platform, facilitating continued growth and lower TCO.
Centralized recovery and availability strengthen data protection
For Kobalt, data protection and recovery are central to the royalty platform’s operating model for greater transparency, speed, and accuracy. Oracle Autonomous Recovery Service provides centralized backups, predictable recovery, and operational consistency for Oracle AI Database workloads.
Additionally, Oracle Maximum Availability Architecture and Oracle Active Data Guard provide architecture, configuration, and lifecycle best practices that help Kobalt with high availability and disaster continuity across the database environment and zones.
This multicloud approach supports Kobalt’s need to keep royalty processing resilient while simplifying the operational model for the team managing the platform.
Partners
Version 1 helped design, develop, and implement the multicloud migration strategy.