EastWest Sounds has given rise to some of the most celebrated music over the last fifty years, from Frank Sinatra to The Rolling Stones, and has produced more Grammy-winning albums than any other studio in the world. They also own a successful software business that runs on Amazon CloudFront. Watch our video case study below to learn more about how EastWest Sounds has found success with Amazon Web Services.
Video Transcription
EastWest Studios was founded by Doug Roberts in 1988. They were the first company ever to put out a commercial sample of sounds for musicians. The company bought the studio back in 2006 when the recording studio business was in major decline. The building was in bad condition and needed a lot of investment, but nobody wanted to put in that investment because the business wasn’t there. But EastWest Sounds had a successful software business that needed recording studios to record everything.
There were a lot of hits that came out of EastWest Studios, big names like Frank Sinata, Elvis Presley, and The Rolling Stones. It was also where Pet Sounds was recording with the Beach Boys. EastWest Studios has become a real haven for the top musicians in the business. In fact, in the last three years, musicians recording at EastWest Studios have had 53 Grammy nominations.
What’s dying are purchases of products, what’s thriving are subscription services. ComposerCloud is the largest, most-awarded virtual instrument collection on the planet. The service takes a bundle of products, which would collectively cost somebody well over $12,000 and puts them into a subscription service so that musicians everywhere can afford it. To EastWest it was an obvious development for their business. The organization put roughly two years into conceptualizing and executing the service. Towards the end of the process, the organization had to figure out how they would get ComposerCloud to all of their customers, because they had nearly 1 TB of data that they could potentially download.
ComposerCloud had a unique challenge. They had an amazing software product that was very significant in size and their users were situated across the globe. Amazon CloudFront provided a simple solution to allow them to distribute all of their content to all of their users, wherever they may be. Amazon CloudFront is a global content delivery network (CDN) service that accelerates delivery of your websites, APIs, video content, and other web assets.
We were able to satisfy ComposerCloud’s requirement for standardized pricing across different markets and enabled us to reduce the cost of customer acquisition so that we could go into many international markets that were once cost prohibitive.
Many software companies today want to scale their business based on subscriptions when their user count grows. Amazon Web Services (AWS), being a primarily OPEX, utility-based pricing model provided the perfect solution to enable ComposerCloud to scale their organization without investing large, upfront capital expenditures.
We don’t just make a product because someone has a drum collection and we need to make one. We make products because either they don’t exist or we think we can do it better. Onica is a Premier Consulting Partner with AWS. For us, as a company also having a 30-year history, we can really appreciate when a business has been able to reinvent themselves and stay relevant to the current market conditions. Over the course of history, EastWest has been used to breaking ground for innovative products and solutions, it’s always been the core philosophy of the company to try to make something that is going to satisfy Hans Zimmer or somebody in that league.
ComposerCloud is an exciting business and its exactly the customer that we enjoy working with. We bring our expertise around AWS services and configuration and we let them focus on innovating and creating new products and successfully growing their business.
