Sonora by Terra Networks

NEXT GENERATION ONLINE RADIO AND DIGITAL MUSIC STORE

Terra is a leading Internet company and original online content producer, owning the broadest audience in the U.S. Hispanic market.  Terra operates both as a Web portal and Internet service provider in the United States, Spain, and 16 Latin American countries. Terra has approximately 60 million unique visitors per month in Latin America, 8 million of them on Sonora, with an average of 12 million music streams per month, and a collection of over 1 million music tracks. Sonora, built by LabOne, uses Media-iBox software engines to capture, manage and distribute music content to its users in several free and paid models, including radio, playlists, paid downloads and subscriptions.     

 

BUSINESS SITUATION

Terra recognized the need to offer a first-rate music service, backed by a huge catalog, including songs from major, local and independent labels, to maintain its competitive edge. Terra’s development team wanted users of its service to be able to:

• Purchase digital tracks or discounted CDs on-demand
• Purchase credits for later use, or for giving away as gift certificates
• Create playlists using several criteria
• Search by genre, artist, album and song with advanced browsing functionality
• Rank songs, artists and albums

Prior to launching Sonora to the general public, it was necessary to populate the service with digital files reflecting hundreds of thousands of songs from major and independent record label catalogs. To comply with rules set by labels such as EMI, Warner, Sony and Universal, Terra needed to protect their songs with leading digital rights management (DRM) technology. LabOne, along with all of its technology components had to pass a comprehensive due diligence process with each major content rights owner. 

 

SOLUTION

Terra designed the service, defining its functionality set, business models and business rules. With Media-iBox certified by the major music labels, and endorsed by Microsoft, LabOne was able to build Sonorawithin 90 days. Sonorasoon became the leading provider of online music in Brazil, as well as one of the most visited destinations among Terra’s properties, attracting a whole new class of users and customers.

 

The service was integrated with all of Terra’s pre-existing portal services, including billing, advertising inventory management, content publishing (for other portal areas) and Web analytics. Terra now has complete visibility and control over Sonora’s business and technical performance indicators, including audience, sales revenue, advertising revenue, traffic and user behavior. Sonora became a global reference case for best practices in user interaction, smart navigation, use of AJAXinterfaces and Microsoft .NET technology.

 

Media-iBox provides a novel approach for the application and enforcement of digital rights management, combining ease-of-use for Terra professionals, seamless experience for users through multiple devices, and complete protection for content providers. Sonoraand the record labels have access to real-time data and rich reporting, to check business performance in detail. 

 

One key component of the process is LabOne’s Media-iBox Uploader, which makes it possible to upload music content in bulk into the system with business rules and metadata automatically applied to each track following rules set by each content rights holder (label or distributor).

 

SONORA 2.0

In 2009, Terra and LabOne launched version 2.0 of Sonora, introducing the first music subscription service backed by major labels in Latin America, and one of the few services of that kind available worldwide. LabOne leveraged Microsoft’s digital rights management technology to allow users to download unlimited songs on unlimited supported devices and mobile phones, paying only a flat monthly fee. The service is totally integrated with the latest versions of Windows Media Player for easy management of music collections.

 

Music discovery and management was enhanced by integration of personalization and recommendation technology by MediaUnbound. Users select up to 5 artists or up to 3 music genres and Sonoraautomatically generates a suggested playlist that can be further refined by the user.

 

The graphically-rich user interface was completely redesigned by world-renowned New York-based digital advertising agency Razorfish to further enhance musicdiscovery, offering more options for navigation, search, playlist building, related music suggestions and user-generated rankings. Social networking features allow people to see who else is online and listening to the same song, artist or genre.

 

Sonora is one of the most successful music services in Latin America, with more than a million registered users and 200,000 paying subscribers.

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