Sanity Entertainment

Summary

Sanity Entertainment is the largest retailer of recorded music in Australia with over 230 music outlets in the country. Operating since 1992, Sanity has seen particularly strong growth over the last decade. To bring this growth to the next level, Sanity sought to produce a digital product, the LoadIt music store, that would meet customers’ existing expectations and live up to the brand’s motto of “Search, Discover, Enjoy.” They wanted to provide as much choice as possible, incorporating subscription and purchase accounts for customers in addition to the best range of digital content. Sanity wanted MP3 Player integration so customers would be able to take their music with them and not be restricted to their PCs. Sanity also sought to deliver a service that would be competitive with existing digital offerings such as iTunes and BigPond.

“The Sanity LoadIt store provides users a fast, easy to use online experience coupled with extremely efficient search capabilities that set it apart from rival offerings.”

-Robyn Ellis, Managing Director, ubeeTech

Challenge

The LoadIt project was initially conceived to launch alongside Windows Vista upon release in Australia. To achieve this, Sanity appointed an international vendor that, over the course of this set timeline, and budget was unable to deliver a robust web-based solution that scaled to fit the project’s needs. As Sanity assessed their options in finding a successful solution, the main challenges they faced were:

·         A cost effective, scalable solution

·         Time constraints

·         Lack of  a web-based system robust enough for very high volume interaction and downloads with Windows Media Player

The set-backs from the initial phase of the project also meant Sanity faced skepticism from both the I.T. and music industries. With the project’s high profile matched by high consumer expectations, team morale was tested in light of all these challenges.

Sanity was also charting unknown territory: their product would be only the second internationally deployed subscription/purchase Type 1 Store (Active Store) online shop experience within Windows Media Player. This meant information around the design or development of the service was not easily accessible.

Solution

Sanity chose to partner with ubeeTech, a young company based in Melbourne that focuses on developing rich, scalable web, mobile and in-situ digital systems for some of the largest organizations in the Australian market. ubeeTech’s mix of business and technology skills, and experience in online media and ubiquitous devices made them the perfect choice to develop a strategy to roll out the application in the timeframe needed within a realistic budget.

Says Ray Itaoui, CEO of Sanity Entertainment: “The Sanity LoadIt service built by our technology partner ubeeTech will make online music accessible for the masses. It’s a rich, vibrant and easy-to-use experience that reflects the excitement of our stores. The service will also give consumers freedom and choice because it lets you listen to vast amounts of music across many different personal music players – not just on the one brand.”

ubeeTech initially joined the project in a technical role, offering professional developer services to build the LoadIt application. As the project progressed, they became involved in leadership and strategic roles to assist Sanity in making the transition from an extremely successful music retail company to a competitive player in the digital world.

The development necessitated integrating hardware infrastructure produced during the previous stages of the LoadIt project. As part of the overall solution, ubeeTech evaluated CMS systems such as Telerik Sitefinity, Umbraco and Kentico CMS for ASP.NET before choosing Sitecore.

Sitecore was chosen for its extensible versioning system, dynamic rendering engine, and beautiful and easy-to-use application interface. Sitecore also offered the ability to customize the system to an extensive degree to meet ubeeTech’s specific needs. The application has been built to allow multiply languages but the system is currently delivering content in English.

According to Robyn Ellis, Managing Director, the LoadIt project gave ubeeTech “the opportunity to technically integrate with some fantastic enterprise solutions like Sitecore to deliver a service of which we are proud. The Sanity Loadit store provides users a fast, easy to use online experience coupled with extremely efficient search capabilities that set it apart from rival offerings.”  

While the initial integration process proceeded smoothly, a limitation within Windows Media Player meant some of the standard Sitecore components needed to be specially modified to obtain the desired results. This was readily accomplished with Sitecore’s fully open API. Other systems were enhanced and updated to allow the LoadIt application to work correctly with the load balancing necessary to support Sanity’s 1 million plus music library and ubeeTech’s underlying systems.

Result

Sanity’s online store has enjoyed thousands of new visitors, with consistent increase since the launch of the LoadIt application. There are thousands of new registered users since the service went live. 

Part of Sanity’s success is due to the easy navigation of the music catalogue. The LoadIt application’s structure downloads the entire catalogue as a file to the local user’s machine, making navigation and search functions within Windows Media Player faster. Once users have found the content they are interested in, they are able to listen to a preview of the song prior to purchase.

Chris Giddings, Technical Director at ubeeTech is particularly proud of “the seamless downloading of music…behind the scenes this is actually quite a complex process but to the user it appears effortless.”

Technical Description

The site heavily utilizes the Windows Media Player “External” object to allow integration from the web to the plug-in. For example, when the user clicks an album from the “latest albums releases” tray this loads the required album.
The majority of components required for the system were custom built to deliver speed for the end user. Most of these components were built around Windows SDK’s or extended onto IIS. T he application makes heavy use of Sitecore’s extensible pipeline and event model to deliver the required functionality, another major factor why Sitecore was chosen over other CMSs.