Duration: 24:20
PART 1 — Analytical Summary 🚀
Context 💼
This session features Sasha (Head of Product, Winamp Group) and Gum (Founder, Sigma Jensen, an Odoo partner) unpacking how Winamp Group modernized a five-company portfolio using Odoo as the operational core. The talk centers on replatforming legacy tools into a scalable, API-first, headless architecture—delivering seamless music discovery, licensing, streaming, and creator workflows while keeping accounting, subscriptions, and CRM unified for a publicly traded organization.
Core ideas and innovations ⚙️
Winamp Group spans five businesses—most notably the Winamp player (desktop and mobile), Jamendo Licensing for music rights, Hotmix (a radio streaming SaaS with 70 stations), Bridger for copyright management, and the new Winamp for Creators platform. The product vision is to reconnect artists and fans through direct-to-fan experiences while equipping creators with end-to-end growth tools.
To get there, the team needed clean accounting across Belgium, Luxembourg, and France entities, modern UX, and a path to scale. They began with Odoo Accounting for multi-company needs, then tackled e-commerce and subscriptions. After evaluating Shopify/WooCommerce, they found the required customizations costly and fragile. They first considered Odoo Website + eCommerce for Jamendo but rejected it because a “continuous audio player” (music keeps playing while navigating) would have required deep front-end surgery and painful upgrades.
Instead, Sigma Jensen proposed a headless e-commerce approach: a Next.js storefront with no separate database, connected directly to Odoo (the single source of truth) via APIs. The front-end handles user experience—search, discovery, accounts, and a continuous player—while Odoo provides products, catalogs, pricing, users, sales orders, invoicing, subscriptions, payment flows, CRM, helpdesk, and accounting. Critically, they retained the standard Odoo eCommerce checkout and payments (e.g., e-wallet demo), so no reinvention was needed for the last-mile flow.
They isolated domain logic into custom Odoo modules (tracks, playlists, artists, radios, moderation, CMS-like content and banners), added a Dropbox connector and a custom page builder, and deployed everything in an AWS cluster. Search at Jamendo includes natural-language cues—“a bit of AI”—that can prompt for mood/theme and suggest appropriate tracks.
The pattern was then replicated for Hotmix: a headless web app and native iOS/Android apps sharing the same Odoo backend, with native Odoo Subscriptions (including proration on plan changes) and customer management. For Winamp for Creators, which retains its own database, Odoo acts as the unified moderation back office: moderators review tracks inside Odoo (kanban/list views, inline audio, status updates), with statuses propagated via APIs back to the SaaS.
A standout benefit of this design is maintainability. Because business logic resides in Odoo custom modules and the storefronts are decoupled, upgrades are far less risky. The team reports >2,000 hours of work initially (built on Odoo v17) and an upgrade to Odoo v18 completed in roughly a day—enabling a planned yearly upgrade cadence to stay at the forefront of accounting features and audit readiness.
Impact and takeaways 💬
This architecture improved SEO, page speeds, and UX while preserving standard Odoo checkout and financial integrity—reducing risk and total cost. Jamendo saw a significant lift in conversion and sales; Hotmix reported around a 20% increase. Operationally, onboarding is faster (teams learn one tool: Odoo), moderation is streamlined, and marketing/content updates propagate instantly through APIs. The multi-company setup in Odoo eases consolidation and audit workflows for a public company.
Implementation velocity has been strong: Jamendo V1 went live in 4–5 months from POC; Hotmix web and mobile launched in parallel; Winamp for Creators’ moderation back office was delivered in ~2 months. Going forward, Winamp Group will apply the model to Bridger and migrate creator billing/subscriptions from Stripe to Odoo to centralize accounting and reduce costs.
The big idea: Odoo can serve not only as an ERP but as the central business engine for headless e-commerce and SaaS—powering scalability, upgradeability, and compliance without sacrificing a modern, app-like UX. 🧠
PART 2 — Viewpoint: Odoo Perspective
Disclaimer: AI-generated creative perspective inspired by Odoo's vision.
What I love here is the discipline around simplicity: keep the front-end free to innovate, and keep the back-end standardized. When teams use Odoo’s native flows—checkout, invoicing, subscriptions—upgrades become routine rather than risky. That’s exactly how you get both speed and resilience.
Headless is not about adding complexity; it’s about placing complexity where it belongs. If Odoo remains the single source of truth and APIs are clean, you unlock a composable future without breaking the accounting backbone. The community’s role is key too—partners who understand both front-end performance and back-end rigor make these wins repeatable.
PART 3 — Viewpoint: Competitors (SAP / Microsoft / Others)
Disclaimer: AI-generated fictional commentary. Not an official corporate statement.
This is a pragmatic blueprint: keep a modern, SEO-friendly UX on the edge and centralize commerce, subscriptions, and finance in a unified core. For mid-market portfolios, it offers a compelling time-to-value. The yearly upgrade cadence is notable; isolating logic into modules and retaining standard flows minimizes TCO.
The challenges ahead are classic at scale: API governance, test automation for annual releases, and ensuring compliance coverage (audit trails, multi-entity taxes, IFRS/SOX-like controls) continues to meet public-company expectations. Media-rights data can be intricate; robust data models and event pipelines will matter as volumes grow. UX differentiation versus full composable commerce stacks will hinge on how quickly they can extend this pattern across new channels and brands while preserving maintainability.
PART 4 — Blog Footer Disclaimer
Disclaimer: This article contains AI-generated summaries and fictionalized commentaries for illustrative purposes. Viewpoints labeled as "Odoo Perspective" or "Competitors" are simulated and do not represent any real statements or positions. All product names and trademarks belong to their respective owners.