FastMusic is a collaborative solutions ecosystem for clearing and licensing music for the entertainment industry. My role in this project was being one of the 2 designers who collaborated from the first draft up to the implementation of a design system.
Originally posted here
When we watch a movie or a TV show, we're usually oblivious to the backstage behind their soundtrack. It usually involves inaccessible spreadsheets, stacks of paper files, overwhelming desks and back-and-forth emails with no historical information to reference. With more than 2 million songs licensed every year and being a 4 billion dollar industry, this scenario affects several people: from writers and composers to Performance Rights Organizations (PROs) and studios, who are doing a very time-consuming, manual work. It involves tracking down all data sources, get the right licenses, pay rights holders and all this staying within their allocated budget.
Our strategy was to bring unity to the currently fragmented process. Licensing a song is, in broad terms, a two step process: budgeting and clearing first; scheduling, shooting and paying later. The client's team already had two products in place: FastTracks, a licensing information database; and FastClear, used for music clearance and budgeting. They wanted to add another software to this stack: FastCue, a new solution built from scratch for cue sheet reporting and managing. A modern, interlocked product ecosystem both from a design and development standpoint, having a common Design System across both FastClear and FastCue.
As a starting point, we had a kick-off sprint with the client's team. The main goal here was to understand and gain insights on the product, the market and the industry. We were very lucky to work with music industry and software veterans, so we were able to ask both business and technical questions. Since this was a new industry for us, we had to start from basic questions like "what's a cue?" — turns out it's the musical moment in a media and it's tied to royalties.
We had to dive deep to design the ideal cue sheet creation process. The first step is to define your project type (movie, TV show, etc). The users then plan which songs you want to include in their project. At this point they can query FastTracks database to get rights holders information. Later they can try different budget scenarios: which songs they are planning to get and how much of their allocated budget they cost. Once the budget scenarios are defined, negotiations begin. Users send letters to all rights holders requesting performing rights based on a set of pre-defined variables, like countries and media distribution. Unfortunately, this process still has to be done by email, but now each song has a status, which allows it to be tracked, and historical pricing values can be referenced to accelerate decision-making at production level.