Spotify Optimizes Post Production With Chesapeake Systems, OpenDrives

Spotify has been providing streaming music services since 2008. Spotify and iconik both originate from Stockholm, Sweden. As of 2020, there are 1,750,000 podcasts in the world, and the market demand for podcasts continues to rise.

Spotify has positioned itself as a leader in the curation and creation of podcasts—with over 2.2 million podcast episodes in its catalogue. Part of this strategy has involved acquiring popular podcast networks like Gimlet Media, Parcast, and The Ringer. Another part of its strategy involves licensed and exclusive content like The Joe Rogan Experience or Renegades: Born in the USA with President Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen.

Ben Meadors, Manager of Post Production at Spotify, oversees the post-production technology infrastructure and services for Spotify Studios in Los Angeles. His role is to design the processes to safely bring content into and through the organization, and onward to delivery and archiving.

One of the first challenges Ben took on was to remove the limitations presented by an external hard drive workflow. CHESA worked with Ben to design a system so now on-premise content is stored on OpenDrives shared storage in multiple geographic locations, and indexed in iconik. The iconik Storage Gateway (ISG) manages these storages and sends proxy versions into the iconik cloud and indexes them in iconik offering a complete view over all assets in the different locations from anywhere. Users can search, preview, download, and request originals as needed.

Another challenge was creating a solution for quick asset recovery.

“It used to be convoluted to find assets, but now it can be a three button click,” says Meadors. “The time saved by this excited many of our key stakeholders, which made iconik buy-in that much stronger at the start.”

With iconik managing all of Spotify’s podcast media assets, there is a whole suite of tools to help creative teams find media fast.

Now, editors can retrieve whatever assets they need with search tools like Visual AI Auto-Tagging, Search for Spoken Phrases in Transcripts, Filtered Searches, Saved Searches, and Discovery View. With media assets so easy to find in iconik, teams are finding more uses for them. Everything is visible and nothing is wasted.

Spotify has five studios under it making podcast and video content. The episodic nature of podcasts requires quick delivery times and rotating teams of freelancers. Previously, none of the five studios used a media management solution. Spotify can now access final master assets that are then backed up to the cloud and tagged. CHESA and Spotify made sure to create solutions that wouldn’t be disruptive or add complexity.

“iconik was a fit because it grows with your creative organization’s needs.” says Peter Price, VP of Solutions at CHESA. “The ease and agility at which iconik has fit into so many workflows as a creative hub has led to plans for even further integration.