Google LLC announced its first major cloud customer win of the year today, saying that Bertelsmann Music Group has chosen to build a highly scalable global infrastructure atop of its Google Cloud Platform.

One of the largest digital media companies in the world, BMG said in a release that its streaming services generate around 1,500 to 2,000 times as many transactions as its physical album sales, and that it needs to process billions of lines of income it receives and distribute this equitably to the hundreds of artists, songwriters and other rights holders on its books. What’s more, it operates numerous different platforms and streaming services, and it also gets income from radio and TV stations that use its material.

BMG said one of the reasons it opted for Google’s cloud is its BigQuery data warehouse service and its Dataproc analytics tools, which enable it to easily add or delete the computing resources it needs to scale its royalty processing. Through that, it can ensure the accurate and timely payment of artist royalties while minimizing its operating costs, it said.

BMG said it’s migrating more than 1,500 components, servers and databases from its on-premises data centers to Google’s cloud.

“With its modeling data in Google Cloud, BMG can then more easily explore previous data points such as popularity of certain downloads among device types and ultimately discover new revenue opportunities,” Google said.

BMG is also using Google’s artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to create more effective marketing campaigns and help its media customers discover the right music for their commercials, films and TV shows.

“BMG is at its heart a service company for artists and songwriters, and we are constantly optimizing our business to improve that service and deliver it more efficiently,” said Gaurav Mittal, BMG’s vice president of group technology. “With the move to Google Cloud, we can now tap into relevant data across the music lifecycle with smarter analytics tools, to benefit our artist and songwriter clients.”

Image: BMG/Facebook