Teradata Powers Analytics for Napster Next-Gen Music Streaming Products

Teradata announced today that Napster, a leading music streaming service, is upgrading its analytic ecosystem to implement the Teradata® Unified Data Architecture™.

The deployment includes multiple nodes of the Data Warehouse Appliance with Teradata QueryGrid® for seamless data and systems integration and, in addition, a Teradata Appliance for Hadoop with Cloudera. Digital streaming is one of the most widely accepted methods of distributing musical content.

According to a report from The Recording Industry Association of America® (RIAA), streaming is the U.S. music industry’s largest generator of revenue. Streaming content on multiple platforms has given a lift to emerging artists wishing to self-promote and enhanced the online musical experience for millions of music fans worldwide.

With a catalog of over 40 million songs, Napster delivers a premium music streaming experience to more than three million paying subscribers in 34 countries across the globe. “This upgrade establishes Teradata’s UDA technology as the go-forward foundation for analytics to drive Napster’s next-generation music streaming products,” said Brian Ringer, Chief Technology Officer, Napster. “Our newest product offerings such as the Listener Network — which measures music taste overlap among like-minded music fans around the world to help them discover more music they love — demands more advanced big data tools and techniques for understanding and leveraging customer behavior.

“Teradata helps us optimize detailed customer level data — including content and application usage, and gives us the ability to more effectively analyze and predict lifetime customer value through customer behavior and usage data. As we leverage big data through our UDA and new Hadoop Appliance with Cloudera, we expect to understand and serve our customers with deeper personal relevance and even greater listening enjoyment.”

The current digital landscape is evolving with the ability to track listeners’ preferences using music analytics. This data provides deep insights into listeners’ behaviors, so that listeners can quickly get the music they want. Big data analytic teams and businesses use data lakes, often Hadoop platforms, combined with data warehousing, to mine customer data, stay relevant and keep listeners engaged and loyal.

“Teradata helps clients like Napster get more value from their data through the deployment of Cloudera as part of its Unified Data Architecture,” said Tim Stevens, vice president, Business and Corporate Development, Cloudera. “Teradata and Cloudera together enable clients to orchestrate workloads to deliver more data to the right people at the right time. The power of the Teradata Hadoop Appliance with Cloudera minimizes the number of moving parts required for deployment and operations, which significantly accelerates the pace to positive results and reduces total cost of ownership.”

To this point, Napster is deploying Teradata QueryGrid, which works to connect a Teradata and Hadoop system to massive scale, with no effort, and at speeds of 10 terabytes per second.

“We are excited to see Napster deploy the Teradata UDA with QueryGrid, which orchestrates the use of multiple analytic engines and file systems, enabling bi-directional data movement and pushdown processing on data where it resides,” said Jeff Deaton, vice president, Teradata. “Users don’t care where their data is, they just want answers to their question, regardless of where it’s sitting or how it’s processed. That’s what QueryGrid brings to the Napster analytic ecosystem. Teradata integrates data and systems better than anyone on the planet.”