Create Music Group: Keeping the Beat with Astronomer

The Customer

Every artist wants to know how their music moves the world. Create Music Group makes that possible. The Los Angeles–based company has built one of the most dynamic data platforms in the entertainment industry—helping artists and labels understand how every stream, spin, and view translates into impact and revenue.

At the center of this innovation is Miko Chen, Lead Data Engineer and the driving force behind Create’s analytics and orchestration stack. Her team doesn’t just crunch numbers, they make data sing: building the pipelines, governance, and models that let creators see their music’s reach in real time.

“Our mission on the data team is to make music streaming and revenue data accessible, accurate, and actionable for every artist and label we support.” Miko Chen, Lead Data Engineer

The Challenge

As Create scaled, its existing system hit a sour note. The company relied on cron jobs and Google Cloud Composer, tools that couldn’t keep pace with the syncopated rhythm of real-world music data. Reports lagged, retries piled up, and testing environments slowed to a crawl.

“Before Astronomer, we had to rely on cron jobs, manual scripts, and Google Cloud Composer,” says Miko. “Those cron jobs often ran on fixed schedules that didn’t align with when data became available, meaning reports were frequently outdated and required manual retries. Composer also added friction with slow environment setup, limited flexibility for CI/CD, and long lead times for Airflow upgrades. If a job failed, we had to restart it ourselves, and these limitations made it hard to maintain and test at scale. It created a huge burden on the team.” Miko Chen, Lead Data Engineer

The data group needed a consistent, automated environment to keep its pipelines in tempo with artist activity across platforms.

The Solution

Enter Astronomer’s managed Airflow service, Astro—a modern orchestration platform built to make scaling simple and seamless. The migration from Google Cloud Composer to Astronomer aligned with Create’s move from Airflow 1 to 2, giving Miko’s team the perfect moment to rebuild for reliability.

“Astronomer offered a smoother setup, faster testing, and better CI/CD integration than Google Cloud Composer. We could finally focus on building pipelines instead of managing infrastructure.” Miko Chen, Lead Data Engineer

With Astro, Create integrated BigQuery, Google Cloud Storage, and APIs from Spotify, YouTube, Apple Music, and Amazon Music into a single orchestration layer that drives analytics, financial forecasting, and even acquisition modeling for potential label and catalog deals.

The Results

Since moving to Astronomer, Create’s data platform has hit a new groove:

• 60%+ Faster Development: New pipelines now roll out in days, not weeks. “It really helps us iterate faster,” says Miko.
• 50% Less Platform Overhead: With Astronomer managing Airflow, the team spends more time innovating and less time on maintenance. “We don’t have a separate DevOps team, so saving that time lets us focus on what matters—data and insights.”
• 600+ DAGs in Harmony: Airflow pipelines now power everything from artist dashboards to revenue forecasts. “Astronomer’s UI includes built-in alerting we can configure without changing DAGs—it helps us keep every pipeline on beat,” notes Miko.
• Zero-Day Innovation: Astronomer’s managed release cycle lets Create test new Airflow features, like dynamic task mapping, the same day they drop. “Before, we waited months for Composer updates. Now, we’re part of the first wave,” Miko adds.

What’s Next

Create Music Group’s next track: a move to Airflow 3, where human-in-the-loop operators and real-time event-driven orchestration will keep its data platform as current as the charts. With Astro as its foundation, the company is building toward a future where insights drop in real time—just like a new single.

“Astronomer is central to our business. Every team—from analytics to finance—relies on data that starts in Astro.” Miko Chen, Lead Data Engineer