Hosting and cloud computing industry powerhouse Rackspace announced the launch of Rackspace Media Services at SXSW today. The solution provides an open source, direct-to-consumer (D2C) web infrastructure for music recording labels and other media segments that need to accelerate content delivery online and scale to fan demand.

Music industry websites are increasingly reliant on e-commerce, are struggling with facilitating user generated content and the developing social media and custom applications. The result is that artists are turning outright to third-party solution providers for distribution, sales and promotion. 

“Music recording labels have traditionally focused their resources on non-differentiating IT tasks or have outsourced their D2C applications to third parties in an attempt to support hundreds of Artists’ complex sites and infrastructures. Rackspace gives labels the freedom to focus on differentiating their businesses via application development and the support of business processes to meet the needs of both the Artist and the fan,” said Wes Laird, Director of Rackspace Media Services, Rackspace Hosting.

The specific components of Rackspace Media Services’ include a dedicated implementation team that delivers a scalable website infrastructure backed by URL uptime service level agreements, access to  LAMP technology professionals, URL and device monitoring, a structured process to identify and prevent application performance problems prior to live production allowing for seamless push of code changes and simplified rollback, and optional server burst architecture for unplanned traffic spikes.

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