National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM)

Company Profile

Established in 1958, the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM) is a not-for-profit trade association that serves the music retailing community in the areas of networking, advocacy, information, education and promotion. The Association's membership includes music and other entertainment retailers, wholesalers, distributors, record labels, multimedia suppliers, and suppliers of related products and services, as well as individual professionals and educators in the music business field. NARM’s retail members operate 7,000 storefronts that account for almost 85 percent of the music sold in the $12 billion U.S. music market.

Challenge

A primary benefit of membership to NARM is the ability for distributors to share their music, and movie release data with the public. This process entailed a distributor uploading a fixed width file containing release data. This file was limited to a single file format, which required some distributors to reformat their data before uploading.

Members were able to download the raw files distributors uploaded from an FTP site. Before analysis or searching of these files could occur a member would need to import the files into their own database software. This limited the use of the data to IT personnel.

Solution

NARM recognized the limitation of the existing release data distribution method and wanted to improve their member’s experience. We developed an import application that was capable of handling not only the existing file format but also other leading file formats. This gives distributors more choices when uploading data.

We developed a search engine which allows members and visitors to NARM’s web site to search releases by Genre, Distributor, Label, product format (cd, mp3, dvd…) as well as other criteria.

In addition to showing release data on the web site members can download data in the following popular formats: CSV, pdf, word format, and standard text file

Benefits

• Less preparation of data by distributors due to support of multiple industry standard formats
• Easy to find release data due to searching capabilities
• Release data can used with without the need for IT personnel to prepare it for viewing

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