Project Manager of Epitaph Data Migration Project - 2011/2012

Late 2011 I was approached by Brett Gurewitz Epitaph Records to Project Manage a move of all their product metadata (and music files too) over to FUGA. FUGA is primarily a system that music labels use to manage their music catalogs and deliver to the people who sell digital downloads (DSP’s). Epitaph is already using ADA/Warner to do this and was actually motivated by a desire to have better access to their metadata. Brett wanted all the old data into FUGA so that, in the future he would have a complete set in one location.

The challenge of the project

was that after transitioning to FUGA as a metadata repository, it did not make sense to have to enter the data a second time for ADA/Warner. Epitaph wanted FUGA to deliver the products (albums, singles, etc.) to ADA directly - which is not something that ADA was set up to handle when we started.

Both teams were very helpful and developers were put into action. I acted as the central communications and control hub - making sure that Epitaph got what they needed and that information made it’s way back and forth between the development teams. The original plan called for a round trip test of several products. The data was going to be delivered from ADA to FUGA, ingested into the FUGA system, and then delivered back to ADA again. If we got the same thing out the other end, then the everything worked.

As is often the case with software development,

what initially seemed easy turned out to have additional difficulties. We discovered many inconsistencies between the two different data systems. After lots of hard work by both teams, and a gargantuan effort from ADA to collect decades of old metadata about the Epitaph back catalog, we were ultimately successful. The ADA data was spread across multiple systems and I wrote a fair amount of custom Python code to collate the data into a format that was workable for FUGA.

One example of these inconsistencies was the territories where the albums are permitted to be sold. FUGA was working strictly off the ISO country code system, with every country listed in a single field. ADA used plain language designations that were translated by some downstream system. Getting a clear definition of what a simple description like “North America” translated to in ISO codes was hard enough but translating
“World excl Australia,New Zealand, Ireland”
into something like this…
"BY|BE|BG|HR|CY|CZ|DK|DE|ES|EE|FI|FR|GR|HU|IS|IE|IT|LV|LT|LU|MK|MT|MD|NL|NO|AT|PL|PT|RO|SK|SI|SE|CH|TR|GB|RU-BE|LU|NL" was an interesting side-track.
With down-time mid-project as each development teams took time off to work on other products/projects it was a long stretch to get to the end but by end of July, 2012. We had successfully transferred all the data info FUGA and begun using them for delivery to the ADA system. Ultimately a very successful project and

the Epitaph team is happy with the results.

Sidenote

- one of the interesting things that Epitaph was able to do with the FUGA system is automatically populate information about new products automatically to a website. They were still developing this idea as I completed my project but the basic idea they leveraged is that FUGA delivers the metadata to any supplier as xml. It was a relatively simple process for Epitaph to work with their web developers to read the xml and automatically populate a database with all the album information. Pretty cool!

Tags: Project Management