In 2014, the music industry faced a critical challenge: there was no way to legally distribute and monetize derivative works like DJ mixes and remixes on major streaming platforms. Content creators couldn't legitimately share their work, rights holders couldn't track usage of their intellectual property, and streaming platforms couldn't tap into this growing content category. The industry needed a solution that could identify copyrighted content within derivative works, manage licensing, and distribute royalties – all at scale.

As product owner from concept through acquisition, I led the development of MixBANK, a first-of-its-kind B2B2C marketplace for licensing and distributing derivative music content. The challenge was multifaceted: we needed to create entirely new workflows for content identification, build a scalable licensing system, and develop automated distribution pipelines – all while managing complex stakeholder relationships across the music industry.

Starting with a small team of four developers, I wore multiple hats as sprint manager, engineering ops lead, and product manager. As the platform evolved, I scaled the team to 30+ members, including 10 developers, 2 QA engineers, and 11 content operations specialists. Throughout this growth, I maintained ownership of product strategy, stakeholder management, and technical direction.

The core of our solution was MixSCAN, our proprietary audio fingerprinting and rights attribution technology. We faced unique technical challenges: DJ mixes featured overlapping songs, tempo/pitch changes, and audio effects that made traditional fingerprinting insufficient. Our solution combined advanced audio fingerprinting with textual data disambiguation, pushing identification accuracy from 15% to an industry-leading 70%.

We built a robust cloud infrastructure on AWS, using MongoDB with Redis for high-throughput content processing and RDS with Postgres for reliable royalty tracking. The system could process an hour of audio in under 10 minutes, scaling both vertically and horizontally to handle millions of tracks. To ensure continuous improvement, we developed a TestSuite with 500+ benchmark content pieces, allowing us to experiment with various approaches including NLP techniques and machine learning models.

Our development journey followed three key phases:

2014-2016: We focused on perfecting our licensing and audio fingerprinting technology. Working closely with major labels (Universal, Sony, Warner) and publishers, we achieved coverage of over 100M tracks – representing 90% of the world's licensed discography.

2016-2018: We launched partnerships with Apple Music and Spotify, helping Apple create an entirely new "DJs & Mixes" genre category. This required solving complex integration challenges, from metadata formatting to automated content delivery pipelines. We implemented support for both manual CSV imports and DDEX XML Schema, accommodating organizations of all sizes.

2018-2020: We scaled the platform to process $2MM in monthly royalties while maintaining a 1.3% discrepancy rate and 99% fraud detection rate. This growth phase required careful balance of technical debt against market pressures, leading to successful acquisition by PEX in 2020.

Success required coordinating across multiple stakeholder groups:

• Maintained monthly in-person meetings with major labels and publishers in NYC
• Collaborated with 25 influential DJs for feature development and testing
• Conducted bi-monthly sessions with independent labels for pipeline refinement
• Worked directly with Apple and Spotify on content delivery optimization
• Led weekly executive standups and regular board presentations
• Managed daily engineering operations with remote technical teams.

The platform revolutionized how derivative music content is monetized and distributed:

• Created new revenue streams for content creators and rights holders
• Built a network of 20K+ DJ talents
• Processed millions of hours of audio content
• Established industry standards for rights management of derivative works
• Technology now powers copyright protection across major social media platforms worldwide

This journey taught me invaluable lessons about leading complex technical products:

• Building innovative solutions requires balancing stakeholder needs with technical vision
• Success in nascent markets demands systematic, data-driven decision making
• Strong relationships across technical and business stakeholders are crucial
• Protecting engineering teams while maintaining progress requires careful management
• Clear product vision and prioritization processes are essential for healthy company culture

The MixBANK story demonstrates how technical innovation, strategic product management, and careful stakeholder coordination can solve complex industry challenges while creating significant business value.