The music business is notoriously difficult to break in to. Cutting through the noise and getting yourself noticed can be a real challenge, with the industry more competitive than ever. That is where Promo Push comes into the picture. Promo Push is an online electronic music promotion service that offers tailor-made promotion of dance music to an extensive global network of DJs and radio stations.

After launching with the first version of their platform in 2011, the team at Promo Push has seen the company grow into a successful and profitable operation as a result of their hard work. Promo push is now well-known and respected within the industry, with clients ranging from established record labels to new and upcoming talent. Each client of Promo Push can rest assured that their records will get the exposure they deserve and that their music is heard by the people that matter most.

The Mission of Promo Push: 'Our belief is simple - all great records should get the exposure they deserve. Promo Push gives you the tools to make this a reality. The Mission of Promo Push

Keeping up with the beat

In order to ensure that their infrastructure would be able to keep up with Promo Push’s continuing growth, it became necessary to move away from the initial single-server solution. Gradually, the team at Promo Push began to break parts of their platform out into distinct services, moving them off of the web server.

After also completely rebuilding their front end at a certain point, one of the last long-running processes that was yet to be turned into a separate service was the processing of their upload/encode queue. Instead of taking on that challenge themselves, they decided to look at third-party services.

James Lovatt, co-founder and CTO at Promo Push, explains:

James Lovatt

“We initially created an in-house solution for concurrent file uploads and audio encoding. It has been part of the platform since day one and has remained more or less untouched since then. During the initial years of the business, this was sufficient. Whilst it would put some strain on the server, it was never enough to noticeably affect performance and we would rarely end up in situations where a large number of files would be uploaded within a short space of time.

Our increased success in recent years has brought with it the challenges of scaling the platform. Whilst it has been straightforward, it can soak up a lot of development time which we would rather utilize to implement new features and improving the platform as a whole. We're not fans of reinventing the wheel unless we have to, so we started to investigate third party solutions.”

Transloadit hitting all the right notes

When it came to looking for a third-party service, the team at Promo Push had a few important criteria in mind. First of all, the service would have to save them development time, in terms of both implementation and maintenance. It would also have to integrate well with their existing storage solution, as well as be able to handle audio encoding. Lastly, the service should provide a simple API or library for uploading files and retrieving upload progress.

When searching for options online, they quickly came across Transloadit and it became evident that its versatile uploading & processing service met all of these requirements.

James explains the choice for Transloadit:

“There were two major contributing factors to us choosing to work with Transloadit. Upon arriving at Transloadit's homepage, it was immediately clear what value they could add - a solution that would take care of all of our upload and encoding needs. The Transloadit documentation answered all questions we had. Secondly, the free 2GB trial meant we were able to try integrating Transloadit into the Promo Push platform to see if it worked for us. Additionally, Transloadit's pricing structure is both very clear and reasonable.”

Integration of the Transloadit service into the Promo Push platform went off without a scratch.

“It was quick and straightforward to setup our Templates and within a couple of hours, we had swapped out our code and were uploading and encoding audio.”

A fruitful collaboration

It has been a just few months since Promo Push made the decision to outsource the uploading and encoding of their audio files to Transloadit, but they are already reaping the benefits. Transloadit’s versatility and scalability will now help to make sure that Promo Push can keep growing, so that even more great records will reach the ears of dance music lovers around the world.

“We saved a huge amount of time by working with Transloadit. To have rebuilt our upload / encode processes as a separate service would have taken up a huge amount of development time; the cost of running additional servers would be comparable to the cost of working with Transloadit, but without the benefit of having a lot of the heavy lifting taken care of! The time we’ve saved has allowed us to keep enhancing Promo Push, pushing us on to bigger and better things.” – James Lovatt