Challenge
A leading music app, nugs.net brings the experience of a live concert to iOS and Android devices. Featuring bands such as Metallica, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam, listeners receive flawless, high-fidelity audio - straight from the source. 2014 Beginnings nugs.net’s journey began in 1997, as a web-based fan site for downloading and buying live music. Over many years, the music industry became increasingly mobile and subscription-based - to stay competitive, nugs.net knew they needed to breach into gapless streaming, backed with a product-based business model, and a fresh, distinctive design.
Solution
2014 To do this properly, they needed an equally quality-driven partner to help. In an industry filled to the brim with lackluster, lookalike music apps, nugs.net needed a new look for both web and mobile, as well as a user experience to fit their tens of thousands of artists & concerts. 2016 Livestreaming When you’re the market leader for exclusive live concerts, you need the technology to match. By adding online streaming of live, high-definition performances, users could listen and watch shows from all over the world, in real time. Flawless webcasting, to match the spectacles themselves. 2016 Sonos Support When your audio is incredibly HD, you need to do it justice. With teams of audiophiles on both sides of the product, linking nugs.net to Sonos wireless home sound systems made perfect sense. Via Reinvently’s experience in the IoT, nugs.net’s catalogue was now available to an even wider audience. 2017 HI-FI Streaming Never stop improving. Featured artists were producing live recordings of exceptional quality, so nugs.net’s service had to match. Adding hi-fi streaming wasn’t just about showing these tracks off - it was about improving subscriptions with lossless audio, and creating the best possible user experience. 2017 Subscription Video On-Demand People who’ve been to concerts know that it’s not just about the music. The sheer unbridled energy and visuals add to the entire performance, transforming the music into something greater. Subscription video on-demand (SVOD) is the next best thing, so we worked together on enabling a flexible, subscription-based business model that supported the needs of both artist and user alike. 2018 MQA Audio Providing a new way to capture the original performance, then replay it at an extreme quality, is what made MQA the next feature to grace nugs.net’s featureset. We swiftly added MQA Playback to their iOS app, in what was one of the first implementations of MQA on an Apple device. Ever since, subscribers can enjoy MQA feedback on thousands of full-length concerts. 2018 External Device Support Music and life share the fact that choice makes them better. Bringing even more of our IoT proficiency to nugs.net, the app became compatible with even more external devices. From AirPlay on iOS to Chromecast on Android, subscribers gained the ability to watch their pay-per-view concerts and nugs.tv streams to their home theater systems. 2018 Ticket Scanning We’ve talked about how nothing beats the real thing, so why not combine it with a digital experience? Starting with Dead & Company, concert-goers could scan their ticket barcodes into the app, receiving free audio streaming on iOS and Android for the events they attend. 2018 Taking the Product Approach Concerts are exciting, but nugs.net is still a serious business. Throughout the entire process, Reinvently has used analytics that were directly built into the app - from launch, to the day you’re reading this page. True, data-driven decision making has shaped the entire developmental process of nugs.net, and continues to do so. Key metrics have been integral to the strategies adopted by both nugs.net, and Reinvently. 2019 360 Reality Audio Working with Sony 360 Reality Audio proprietary technology across 3 teams, including Sony's development team, we incorporated panoramic sound into our nugs.net app. We reimagined the app from the ground up to enable on-the-fly decoding of lossless audio streams and reshaping into a 360° spherical sound field that creates an unprecedented spatial experience for listeners according to the artists' vision. Platform specifics necessitated different approaches for iOS and Android, leading us to make many low-level solutions for the coding and app architecture. The final rebuilds achieved our goal of delivering the best experience for users while guiding them through the complex sound optimization process. All this was done with an eye to conversion rate optimization and superior performance. 2019 Total End-to-End Support Operationally, the nugs.net service is a team effort: Reinvently designs and develops the apps, while nugs.net handles its own backend and e-commerce. Together, we’ve developed a great and close relationship while building and expanding the best live music product in the world. So we’re always ready to support nugs.net anytime, including issues related to nugs.net's own software and infrastructure. We also administer third-party tools, resolve issues and negotiate with folks like Google, Facebook, Apple, MQA, Sonos … and the list keeps growing.
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