Hot Topic’s ShockHound

Hot Topic is an example of a music retailer using Neurotic Media’s API to weave MP3 sales into a much broader online experience at their music and merch community site, www.shockhound.com.

Opportunity

National retailer Hot Topic created a music / merchandise / community brand called ShockHound (www.shockhound.com), where consumers can shop for music-themed apparel, music-related products and MP3s. The site needed to support the unified purchase of physical and digital goods via one shopping cart. Hot Topic fulfilled the physical goods and needed access to licensed MP3s from major record companies.

Solution

Hot Topic chose Neurotic Media as their MP3 partner, opting to use Neurotic Media’s Neurolinq Product™ API as their source for major label MP3s. The Neurolinq™ Product API is integrated into the ShockHound.com site in a seamless manner, delivering MP3s to ShockHound.com’s consumers without the consumers ever seeing Neurotic Media’s presence. ShockHound.com collects consumer payments within that site’s own shopping cart and then invokes the API service for MP3 fulfillment from Neurotic Media, all from “behind the scenes.”

Results

Neurotic Media has simplified the content delivery process for ShockHound.com through a normalized, unified XML feed, while handling all of the royalty reporting and payment reconciliations with various record companies on the back end. Hot Topic’s technical team was able to quickly integrate with one unified API service which serves as a mediation level between their systems and multiple major record company catalogs, coupled with CDN services (Neurotic Media is fully integrated with Content Distribution Network services from Akamai, optimizing last-mile delivery to the consumer), reporting services and royalty clearinghouse services.