New York City-based custom music provider Music Matters has joined the early adoptors of the Barix SoundScape IP distribution and management platform. Serving luxury lifestyle brands, the initial use of the new audio-over-IP delivery system covers hospitality clients with additional rollouts to luxury retail and hospitality brands to follow.
SoundScape is a fully integrated, subscription-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) for streaming business music and advertising over IP networks. The platform brings together cloud-based content management, reliable end-point players and global, centralised monitoring. Quick to deploy and infinitely scalable, it supports dynamic content scheduling, system-wide reporting and monitoring, remote device management, and high-quality, multi-format audio playback among other benefits.
Led by world-class DJ and music curator Jared Dietch, Music Matters specialises in the challenges of sonic branding for luxury businesses. With clients worldwide, Dietch’s previous reliance on a self-architected scheduling and playback system became more complex and costly to operate as his business grew. On recommendation, he turned to SoundScape.
‘I realised I could no longer spend my time and money continuously upgrading computers and operating systems,’ Dietch says. ‘I needed a service that would centralise everything, instead of logging onto specific computers every time I needed to apply an update. With SoundScape, I can upload a playlist and make firmware and software updates once, with the option to apply these changes across the network. The simplicity of the entire system makes our service that much more effective for clients. It allows me to do my job better because I can focus on delivering great programming.’
A significant element of this is simplified content scheduling. The SoundScape portal enables quick scheduling and uploading of playlists, which allows Dietch and his programmers to create specialty playlists on short notice – a common request from clients for special events. Additionally, SoundScape’s failover to secondary playlists, as well as audio player reliability, ensures continuity of service.
‘We were constantly checking our players to make sure they weren’t going down,’ Dietch says. ‘Any moment of stress we have with system elements takes away from our programming time. SoundScape’s concept of a failover playlist is a major benefit, because the number one rule is that there always needs to be music playing. But overall, the SoundScape hardware and technology is rock-solid. The entire platform delivers great value, and has changed the way we work.’
More: www.barix.com
