Music to Work By

There's little doubt that the so-called digital revolution is poised to change everything. Already, music, movies, podcasts and books can be found online, ready for one-click purchase or rental, or - if not copyrighted - immediate download.

But with those advances also come some challenges, including collecting payments, submitting those payments to financial institutions for approval and then keeping track of the process. In today's world of immediate gratification, the entire process has to occur quickly, especially when those transactions pertain to the purchaser.

Key to the process are the behind-the-scenes companies supporting this revolution. The Harry Fox Agency (HFA), for example, acts as a middleman of sorts between music publishers and their customers, which include licensees using music for such media as CDs, digital downloads, online subscription services, ringtones and, yes, even elevator music.

The digital marketplace took off suddenly, thanks to music-subscription services such as (the now legal) Napster and other electronic forms of music distribution, so HFA needed to develop a way to adapt to the new technology and keep up with an increasing number of transactions. It began a push to make more of its applications available online, making it easier for both publishers and licensees to conduct business with one another - and eased the pain of doing so by deploying WebConnect, an Internet-transformation suite of tools from OpenConnect Systems. At the same time, HFA also turned up the volume on its IT systems, consolidating two IBM* iSeries* 820s to a single IBM System i5* 550. And the results, as they say, have been music to everyone's ears.