Background
Musixmatch is the most popular lyrics provider with over 80 million active users worldwide and 1.2 million artists using Musixmatch Pro, its direct-to-artist SaaS business. Since its inception, Musixmatch has assembled the largest lyrics catalog in the world, disrupting the previously unlicensed online lyrics hemisphere with an unrivaled customer experience and revenue channel for rights holders. It has licenses with over 220,000 music publishers, including Sony Music Publishing, Warner Chappell, Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG Publishing, Kobalt Publishing, Spirit Music Publishing, Harry Fox Agency, PeerMusic, Walt Disney Publishing, among others, for worldwide distribution.
With lyrical content for millions of songs across over 100+ languages, Musixmatch provides its service to customers including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, Google, YouTube, Instagram, Tidal and more.
Challenge
Musixmatch enables global platforms like Spotify to display song lyrics to music in real-time, alongside managing rights and royalty administration. Underpinning this is a complex music catalog and database, which matches song lyrics to songwriters and publishers – providing lyrics in multiple languages and matching royalties to the correct rights owners.
Musixmatch operates with a ‘stay small and work smart’ philosophy, constantly iterating and improving efficiency. But when it came to fulfilling client data requests, highly skilled technical staff often had to fetch and analyze data at the expense of engineering work.
Martino Bonfiglioli, Senior Product Manager focused on automation, saw that the process of fetching data could easily be automated, relieving significant bottlenecks and improving the client experience.
“We wanted to be more streamlined and reduce all possible bottlenecks, so we looked into automating our processes. It’s important for us to be pioneers in the tech field, so we wanted to improve the tools we used for automation and find new ways in which we could empower our colleagues to find efficiencies,” Bonfiglioli said.
Solution
Amid an already substantial set of responsibilities, the team needed a powerful out-of-the-box solution to automate the process of fetching client data that was highly customizable, flexible, and could be rolled out to non-technical users.
They chose n8n to act as an interface that enabled easy access to internal APIs, which meant non-technical stakeholders could participate in data requests without requiring access to a complicated underlying data structure.
Using n8n, they started by creating custom modules to access APIs, investing two weeks into building an internal environment, production environment, and customized projects for different teams, alongside a custom internal library.
Today, users simply open the library and select the module that runs the operation they require. Behind the scenes, n8n automates the process of fetching and analysing data, before returning it to the user who entered the request.
“We’re empowering everybody to be autonomous, and, in doing so, we reduced the time spent on open tickets, and the waiting time for clients, which has increased our efficiency tremendously.” Bonfiglioli said. “The idea is that everybody in the organization that works on a product can use n8n to manage data retrieval or data transformation
Impact
n8n had an instant impact on Musixmatch, contributing to improved client relations, reducing bottlenecks, and saving a meaningful 47 days of engineering work across the four months since the workflow was released to production.
“We track our internal workflows and estimate how long it would take manually to do a task, versus automating the process. We estimate that we’d manually spend one minute on data entry or a single, easy query, which extrapolates into significant time savings” Bonfiglioli said.
Musixmatch has also expanded the initial workflow into 27 custom workflow modules with n8n, including a complex data switch workflow that switches lyrics from their original script into different alphabets. This enabled them to swiftly respond to a growing trend for latin-alphabet lyrics, and provide clients with more opportunities for engagement with listeners.
“This was a very complicated workflow that took us one week to build, but now clients can switch the language of lyrics they’re displaying to their customers instantly. And it takes us just 15 seconds now to process this workflow request,” Bonfiglioli said.
Next steps
Musixmatch is already rolling out n8n within different teams to automate workflows, and early feedback is highly encouraging. The organization is also creating an internal academy to upskill staff so they can create simple workflows to automate their own tasks, and establishing a dedicated team to support departments looking to create more complicated workflows.
Further down the road, Musixmatch is planning to explore the application of AI agents to further improve efficiency and dig deeper into combining existing n8n modules to handle more complex workflows.
