VL Group

Rhymba v3.6 Documentation

Introduction

So, we've covered Search and gotten you up and running with querying Rhymba to find the content you're interested in. Maybe you've implemented previews or artist & album artwork into your store. You've gotten a chance to really have some fun with the basics OData, as well as maybe implemented some wackier/more powerful Rhymba queries.

That's all very exciting. But, what now?

It's time to start purchasing & delivering content to your end users.

“Purchases” or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Labels

As a part of our agreements with various digital content providers, including the major labels and smaller boutique distributors, we're required to report to them how their content is being used. It seems pretty reasonable. They give us this incredibly large catalog in a DRM-free format; we, in turn, ingest that content and normalize its metadata so that you (our API customer) have a single entry point to query against millions of pieces of content, all in our own standardized metadata format; you then do "stuff" with said metadata — like, maybe something in a mobile app, or on a web-based music store; your customers decide they want to consume the content, so you charge them; thus, you must tell us about that charge and give us the information we need to report that to the labels and, in turn, give you options of delivering that content to said end user.

Or maybe we handle the charging for you. Or maybe there's no chargeable event, and the "purchase" is merely a reporting formality.

Regardless of those kinds of details, we conceptually separate the acts of "purchasing" your end users may or may not as a part of their interaction with your systems from the act of reporting the "purchase" your system/application should do to Rhymba.

Do you actually need to report a purchase to us?

Answer: Well, it depends. If content is being sold for money in any way, then, yes, this section is relevant to you. But if your service is 100% code-driven, and end users are not paying for the content — i.e., they're using a code to download content at no cost — the Download Session process captures all of the information we need to report to the content providers.

And, as an added bonus of reporting these purchases to us, we handle the backend reporting to the labels (and, if your contract with us includes this, to the respective U.S. PROs as well — European and other PROs are handled on an implementation-specific bases, and we should discuss.)

So let's walk you through validating & reporting a purchase to Rhymba.

Where to Find the Purchases API

All Purchase API requests go through the base URL https://purchases.mcnemanager.com/Purchases.svc/.