MUZ.RU - the Largest Entertainment Web Portal in Russia

IFD Kapital Group is one of the biggest diversified holding company in Russia. It includes insurance, banking services, retirement insurances, broking and beneficial ownership companies. IFD Kapital enters in top-100 Russian companies for its revenue.

Situation

MUZ.RU was developed for Russian Investment Group, called IFD Kapital, which decided to make investments in the sector of digital entertainment services. This sector is underdeveloped in Russia nowadays and represented by very few web-portals, which offer chip or even free of charge music, but they do not meet the requirements of legislation to copyright, besides they are overloaded by adds and not comfortable and easy in use.
So, IFD Kapital decided to make a highly engaging and attractive web-portal of digital music, that will meet the expectations not only of numerous music funs, but also the requirements of Russian legislation protecting copy rights, and the requirements of sound recording studios from all other the world.

Solution

Aplana has developed an entertainment Web-portal which is an e-shop and at the same time a Web-broadcasting system. It has broad functionality allowing listening, navigating through the channel list and the catalog and downloading songs and video clips. They can be purchased by registered as well as unregistered users thus registered ones have broader opportunities of choice and ways of payment. Purchase can be realized in a couple of ways: by credit card, via sms and systems of mobile payments. MUZ.RU supports simultaneous use by several thousands of users who can listen to music without downloading it to computer.
But this solution is really prominent within all the other analogical ones because of the following functional opportunities developed by Aplana specialists:

• E-shop built in Windows Media Player 11 (Type 1). It allows users within WMP user interface choosing a song or an album, buying and downloading them on their computers on a real-time basis after registration in the system. This way of buying music is much more comfortable in comparison with the regular one.
• Subscription to the music. MUZ.RU offers who types of subscriptions. The first one - the users can pay not only for each item, a song or an album, but subscribe for downloading of music for a certain period of time or for a certain number of items. The second subscription is for watching and listening to broadcasting programs. Those who buy this subscription can make their own playlists and publish them to others.
• Digital content protection system built on the basis of Microsoft DRM. Thanks to it MUZ.RU is the first portal in Russia which became a partner of such leading sound recording studios as Universal Music Russia, SONY BMG, Digital Access and many others. So the users of MUZ.RU get access to thousands of high quality tracks in more then 20 styles.

All the above advantages attract lots of music funs and make MUZ.RU a reliable partner for sound recording studios.

Along with these, MUZ.RU is reliable business solution, that has extended and really easy in use administration system for the specialists of the customer who support the system and its content.

• Marketing management system integrated with the portal and with the catalog system allows making marketing analysis and activities, including ads, discounts, direct mail, multi-brand campaign control, personalized experiences, to promote and highlight products in a personalized and loyalty-building way.
• Orders system enables to calculate and capture orders based on customer business logic Transactional with rollback support, order splitting support, split shipping support and others.
• Catalog system allows creating well structured catalogs with vertical and horizontal relations.
• Profile management system provides single view of customer and associated data, personalization support for marketing campaigns, aggregate from multiple data stores.

On the whole, MUZ.RU is a vivid example of how one software solution becomes a unique selling preposition – the largest web-portal of legal music with unique services, and at the same time it is a smart business solution which appears to be a unified field for realization of the corporate business strategy.

Aplana specialists maximized customer’s investments through synergies achieved with the following Microsoft products.
Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. It provided a set of tools for the Web site developer, the IT professional, and the business users to help develop, deploy, and manage MUZ.RU. Thanks to ready made components for automatization of various e-commerce business-processes , Aplana have been able to create a highly competitive solution exceeding customers expectations. The following features of the Microsoft Commerce Server 2007 were used in the solution:

• Marketing management
• Orders management
• Profile management
• Business User Management tools: Customer and Order Manager, Catalog and Inventory Manager, and Marketing Manager.
• Performance, scalability, and high availability through tight integration with Windows Server 2003, 64-bit support, and .NET 3.5 framework support.
• Microsoft DRM - Digital content protection system, which allowed MUZ.RU become the largest portal and a reliable partner of sound recording studios from all other the world.

Windows Media Player 11 allowed to develop an e-shop built in the player.
Windows Media Services allowed to built a broadcasting system for radio and audio/video previews.
Microsoft Silverlight was used to create vivid graphics, which is essential for attraction of not only music fans, but sound recording studios who pay lots of attention to the places where their products are represented.

It was developed with the use of Microsoft products: Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005, Commerce Server 2007, IIS 6.0, Windows Media Services 9.0, on Windows Server 2008, Silverlight 2.0, .Net Framework 3.5, DRM SDK 10, Windows SDK.