Yesterday at the Cloud Identity Summit in Denver, Colorado, Lee Hammond from Interscope Geffen A&M Records (a division of Universal Music Group), and Brian Kissel, CEO of Janrain, spoke jointly about the use of social media tools to improve customer acquisition and retainment. Hammond shared Interscope’s experience to achieve these goals, beginning with a native OpenID implementation and resulting in a relationship with Janrain.

Beginning in 2007, Interscope Records began accepting AOL identities for login on its 125 music artist websites through an in-house implementation of OpenID. Below is a screenshot of Interscope’s third-party login system on Eve.com in 2007:

And on another site:

By 2008, with additional social networks (such as Facebook, Google and MySpace) becoming available for login, Interscope sought to leverage the new identity providers, make the user experience more intuitive, and minimize the challenge of scaling and maintaining the system.

Interscope turned to Janrain Engage in late 2008. Choosing Janrain has enabled Interscope to instantly leverage additional social networks (such as Twitter and Windows Live) as they become available and outsource maintenance of the disparate APIs from each network.

The result? 55% of all logins across 125 music artist sites occur through Janrain Engage, with that percentage as high as 89% on sites like LadyGaga.com. Overall registration rates on all artist sites have improved by 10%, in part due to the intuitive user interface provided by Janrain Engage:

Here are slides from the presentation at Cloud Identity Summit:

Click here to read more about Interscope’s success with Janrain Engage.