Universal Music Group (UMG), is responsible for managing many well-known artists, such as Mindless Behavior, Jennifer Lopez, Lady Gaga, Dr. Dre, Justin Bieber, and their official websites. UMG’s labels include Interscope Geffen A&M, The Island Def Jam Music Group and many more famous labels.

UMG’s challenge was that the content of their artists along with their fans’ posts, comments, and blogs, were all fragmented among various social media and fan sites. The company and the business managers of the artists were overwhelmed, feeling no longer in control of the brands of the artists.

UMG needed a way to centralize where the content, music, and merchandise of the artists was promoted. A big part of the success of artists like Lady Gaga had been that they kept close to their fans, and UMG wanted to find a way to keep that happening in spite of the enormous size of the fan base of some of their artists.

UMG came to Arktan and asked, if we could find all relevant content, if they provided the who, what, and where about the content that interested them. Could we search across a huge base of sites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, blogs, and fan websites? Could we then pull out an artist’s content, and everything being said by people about the artist that UMG would designate as important, like Super Fans and music industry pundits? And could we put this content right onto the artist’s official website, and do it all in real-time?   

Arktan LifeStream (powered by Arktan SocialStreams product) fit UMG’s needs perfectly. LifeStream aggregates and curates content right onto the official websites of the artists. With the ability to add comments and reply to posts, the social influence of the artists' sites has grown dramatically. In addition, for some of the artists such as Lady Gaga, there is a special page for biggest fans that gives them a "being backstage with the artist" kind of experience.

In the words of Lee Hammond from Interscope: “We are bringing in the real-time Social Media activity of our artists from all over the web in one central place using Arktan. Artists are now engaging with their fans on their official websites. Resulting in our artists seeing significant increase in new use registrations, time spent on the site and return visits.”

Content is further enhanced with inline rich media. Photos and videos from sites, such as Twitpic, YouTube, Twitvid, and Yfrog, are integrated into each post in real-time on the artist’s site. Even online stores of the artists, including Mindless Behavior's, have been enhanced with social interaction around each piece of merchandise.

LifeStream has now been incorporated into the core of UMG’s web strategies. Lee Hammond from Interscope said that “We are also launching new user experiences all the time using the innovation Arktan products bring on an ongoing basis.”

Arktan SocialStreams is powering unique user experiences on the websites of several major artists in UMG’s portfolio, including Mindless Behavior, Lady Gaga, Jennifer Lopez, Lil Wayne, and many more.