Modern Musician: Creating New Stars without thinking about Infrastructure

Industry: Music

Use Case: Streamlining cloud application development with isolated cloud environments that integrate the backend and frontend of an application together.

Highlights:

• Modern Musician achieved a remarkable 10x increase in feature rollout, demonstrating increased productivity without expanding team size.
• By adopting Ampt, they significantly cut down on the complexities of infrastructure management, streamlining the development process.
• Modern Musician can now onboard new engineers in just a few hours because of Ampt’s incredibly low learning curve.
• Looking ahead, Modern Musician is exploring a migration to server-side rendered technologies like Next.js, underscoring their commitment to continual technological advancement.
• Their sustained engagement with Ampt reflects a strategic approach to leveraging the platform for future growth and maintaining a competitive edge in the music industry.

In the dynamic world of music, where artists continually seek innovative ways to connect with their audience and monetize their craft, Modern Musician emerges as a beacon of transformation. Specializing in music marketing coaching, Modern Musician empowers independent artists through its Gold Artist Academy, a selective program dedicated to nurturing musical talent. Central to their service is StreetTeam, a sophisticated CRM tool specifically designed for musicians to manage their calendars, engage with fans, and handle transactions. This powerful software, entirely run on Ampt, has become an indispensable asset for artists looking to elevate their careers. Lead Software Engineer Spencer Grimes heads up a team of artist-developers in building and refining StreetTeam, making the principles of Modern Musician's coaching more accessible to artists globally.

Challenge: Managing developer environments and stages in serverless

Before adopting Ampt, Modern Musician encountered significant challenges that slowed down progress. Their main issue was cumbersome and complex infrastructure, particularly when they switched to using serverless. This change brought its own difficulties, especially for team members like founder Michael, who had never developed software before. They often ran into problems setting up their local development environment, leading to confusion between local, testing, and production environments. Though they aimed to operate in a serverless environment and used tools like AWS Amplify and the Serverless Framework, the technical complexity of these tools was overwhelming. This not only made it difficult for new developers but also diverted their focus from developing innovative features for musicians. Managing different environments became a time-consuming task, taking away valuable resources from their core mission of empowering artists.

Removing infrastructure friction with Ampt

In their search for a more streamlined and efficient development process, Modern Musician discovered Ampt. Their journey to Ampt began as they were exploring serverless solutions to simplify their software development. Familiar with the serverless community, they learned of Ampt through their network. What particularly caught their attention was Ampt's promise of simplified environment management and the ability to develop application code locally using developer sandboxes integrated with AWS accounts. This feature seemed a great fit for addressing their challenges, offering a more intuitive experience for their team, including those new to software development. The prospect of eliminating "it works on my machine" and reproducing bugs more reliably in a local environment was a significant draw.

Incorporating Ampt into Modern Musician’s workflow was seamless. They were able to migrate their existing application without needing a complete rewrite. The switch to Ampt allowed them to do away with the complex infrastructure definitions they previously had to manage. The team quickly adapted to the new setup, benefiting from Ampt’s streamlined process which allowed them to focus more on the development of StreetTeam. The impact of Ampt was immediate and profound. With Ampt, the team at Modern Musician could roll out features up to 10x faster, without expanding their team. This acceleration was critical for StreetTeam, enabling them to prototype and iterate ideas rapidly, resulting in a much more reliable and robust application. The simplicity of the Ampt platform also made onboarding new team members easier, consolidating various tools and processes into one vertically integrated system. Ampt became a catalyst for Modern Musician, propelling them forward in their mission to empower artists through technology.

Expanding with Ampt

Looking to the future, Modern Musician has ambitious plans for further integrating Ampt into their operations, especially in the continued development of their StreetTeam application. Spencer Grimes and his team are eager to leverage Ampt's capabilities to their fullest, exploring possibilities such as migrating to server-side rendered technologies like Next.js from their React based front end application. Modern Musician also intends to expand their data infrastructure on Ampt, aiming to harness more powerful analytics and insights that can drive artist success. By continuing to innovate with Ampt, Modern Musician is set to redefine how artists connect with their audience and manage their careers, reinforcing their position as a leader at the intersection of music and technology.