Airtight Beats
Summary
Local record label and production team No Plan B. Entertainment launched Airtight Beats in 2007. Airtight Beats was an online catalogue of their instrumental music. It was also venue for other artists to preview and then purchase/license instrumentals for their own projects.
It was a very unique opportunity and Adsum Drive was really excited to be part of it.
The Challenge
As music producers, the members of No Plan B. pay close attention to detail, so it was no wonder that this project was very detailed in how they wanted things done. It was very important that a visitor to the site could start previewing an instrumental and then continue to browse the catalogue without interrupting the music. The music was never to be interrupted unless the user left the site.
They also wanted a very simple way to select and purchase music. It was key that the process of purchasing a license for one of the instrumentals was as easy and as trusted as possible.
The last and most important requirement was that they could manage the site themselves. They wanted to be able to upload the music files, create and edit instrumental profiles, and monitor sales all from the same administration area.
The Solution
No Plan B. had designed the site themselves so we used their layout and graphics to guide us in the development of this site. A very simple mp3 player was created in Flash to play the instrumentals. In order for the music to never stop, we used ajax to load different content in the main window and to manage the shopping cart. Every instrumental could be played through this music player and/or added to the user's shopping cart. The shopping cart was created from scratch and fed through to PayPal for payment processing. Once a user had purchased a piece of music, they received an email with a link where they could download the full, high resolution instrumental for their use.
To manage the site, we build a customized administration area where all sales and inventory could be monitored. The administrator of the site was able to create new instrumental profiles, upload low-resolution (watermarked) files and upload high resolution files to a secure area. They could also categorize the music and sort them as they pleased.
The site turned out great and the client was very happy with the result. We were very excited to be part of such a unique venture. (UPDATE - the site is no longer online).
