How Lady Gaga’s team built for speed, scale, and creative control

Challenge: A system built for static content couldn’t keep up with Lady Gaga’s dynamic content and creative vision.

Lady Gaga’s team needed a platform that could match their pace and creativity. The previous site was rigid, manual, and lacked creative flexibility. This is a common challenge in the entertainment industry, where artist websites are often a low priority for labels managing hundreds of artists. Most existing solutions offered limited customization, slow update cycles, and generic templates that didn’t align with the fast-paced nature of the music industry.

Key challenges for Lady Gaga's digital team:

• Rigid CMS structures couldn't keep pace with album drops and tour announcements, forcing engineers to handle basic updates instead of building innovative fan experiences.
• Slow, manual workflows created bottlenecks during critical promotional moments. During Grammy appearances and single releases, the team needed immediate updates but faced days-long deployment cycles.
• Disconnected content processes stifled Lady Gaga's creative vision. Her team conceptualized rich, interactive experiences, but the translation to web often lost the artistic nuance and visual impact that defines her brand.
• Developers became content gatekeepers rather than innovators, spending hours implementing text changes instead of building the immersive experiences fans expect from a global pop icon.
• High-stakes launches required flawless execution. With millions of fans flooding the site during major announcements, even seconds of downtime meant lost engagement and merchandise opportunities.
• Content fragmentation across platforms meant the team manually updated the same information across the website, social channels, and tour promotions, creating inconsistencies in messaging and branding.

Unlike legacy CMS platforms that separate content modeling from development, Sanity brings schema, editorial tooling, and content infrastructure into a single system. This gives both developers and content teams shared control and agility.

Lady Gaga's team, led by Michael Polansky, needed a digital platform as versatile as her artistic identity. One that could seamlessly transition between album eras, support multimedia storytelling, and handle the massive traffic surges that accompany a global superstar's announcements.

Commerce-UI led the development of Lady Gaga’s website, delivering an architecture built to meet performance demands and support custom front-end requirements. The bold, visually striking design was crafted by Yung Studio, whose creative direction matched Gaga’s iconic aesthetic at every stage. Together, the two teams created a site that blends two worlds: art and technology.

Solution: A structured, flexible content platform powered by Sanity

To break free from these limitations, the team chose a modern, composable architecture:

• Sanity for structured content management and editorial workflows
  • Content Lake
  • Studio
• Sanity Connect for Shopify
• Shopify for e-commerce foundation
• MUX for high-quality video streaming
• Shopify Hydrogen for the front-end framework
• Shopify Oxygen for delivery

By choosing Sanity as the central content operating system, the team could define a structured and flexible editorial experience, where developers can create custom editorial interfaces for unique page layouts, album promotions, and interactive fan experiences.

Results: Releasing from days to minutes while maintaining structure and control

With Sanity, the team moved from developer-led workflows to a structured system where editors handle 90 percent of the releases. The platform supports fast iteration, consistent publishing, and a content architecture developers can trust.

The results were immediate. The new site became an ever-evolving digital experience, perfectly aligned with Lady Gaga’s creative vision.

The result didn’t just resonate with fans; it earned industry recognition. Lady Gaga’s website won:

• Webby Winner – Entertainment Category
• People’s Voice – Entertainment Category
• People’s Voice – Music Category

The Webby Awards are the leading international awards honoring excellence on the internet, presented by the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS).

1. Developer Efficiency: Fewer bottlenecks, faster iteration

With Sanity’s structured content model and GROQ querying, developers no longer had to build or maintain custom API endpoints, significantly reducing manual work.

Unlike most content solutions where developers are stuck working around rigid models or building custom APIs, Sanity’s schema-as-code and GROQ let you define, structure, and query exactly the content that you need, without extra backend logic or workarounds.

“GROQ has been crucial for us. With Sanity, we can shape the data exactly how we need it, right at the query level, without writing custom API endpoints. That saved us a huge amount of development time and made our content models way more flexible.” Michal Klim, CTO, CommerceUI

Homepage updates that previously took 3+ days are now done in under 30 minutes by the editorial team, without engineering involvement. Schema updates that would have required a full sprint now happen in a matter of days, enabling the team to support ongoing campaign launches and visual redesigns with minimal lift.

“We updated the homepage 3 times within the first two weeks of launch. That kind of iteration speed just wasn’t possible before.” Melody Yung, Designer

Before Sanity, every content change required developer involvement. Now, developer velocity has increased by 90% because:

• The content team runs the show. Gaga’s team can now launch new album visuals, tour dates, and Grammy-night updates without waiting on engineering.
• Less repetitive and manual work. Instead of manually coding text changes or duplicating layouts, engineers built structured components once. Now the editorial team can remix them for each campaign
• Faster output and higher quality. Real-time previews mean no publishing blind. Whether it’s a homepage takeover for a single release or a last-minute merch drop, the team sees exactly what fans will see before it’s live.
• Strong technical foundation. Sanity’s schema-as-code approach makes evolving the content model a low-risk, high-speed task. This is something that’s painful or often impossible with traditional CMS platforms. When Gaga shifts creative direction mid-campaign, the dev team can adapt quickly without a full sprint or a production fire drill.

2. Streamlined Content Operations: from creation to publishing

Entertainment websites are often reduced to rigid templates, but Sanity gave the team complete control to design a unique digital experience for every release.

Most content systems give you a fixed editorial UI with limited control. With Sanity, the team customized Studio to match exactly how they build and launch campaigns, including homepage variants, “mood picker” themes, and launch scheduling. This gave the editorial team the exact tools they needed to move quickly without waiting on engineering to build workarounds.

• Custom editorial workflows inside Sanity Studio to manage multiple homepages, enabling them to experiment and iterate quickly.
• Custom interactive elements, like “mood picker,” were integrated directly into Sanity Studio, allowing the team to control how visual themes were presented based on creative direction.
• Modular page-building enabled content editors to create flexible layouts tailored to specific campaigns without developer support.
• Live preview = no surprises. The team sees exactly how updates will look before publishing—critical during high-stakes moments like Grammy-night launches.
• Content scheduling and version control allowed precise timing of updates, which was critical for coordinating releases with moments like TV spots or social media drops.

Sanity also solved a common limitation: most content systems treat content scheduling as a page-by-page feature. With Sanity, teams can group structured content across document types such as products, promos, metadata, and layouts. They can preview the full release in context before it goes live. That means no surprises and no fire drills during high-visibility drops.

Pro Tip: Coordinating a precise, high-stakes launch like this is exactly why we built Sanity Content Releases. Many of our customers need to publish multiple pieces of content at once—across pages, layouts, and channels. They need to preview exactly how the release will look before it goes live. Content Releases allows you to group changes, schedule them as a unified update, and confidently deliver at the right moment. Whether it's a global campaign or a time-sensitive drop, everything can be reviewed, staged, and shipped together. Learn more about Content Releases.

3. Scalability & Performance: 0% downtime during one of music’s biggest drops

When Lady Gaga announces a new project, fan traffic arrives in seconds, not hours. The team needed a system that could handle high-volume spikes and still allow last-minute updates without delays, downtime, or degraded performance.

• 0% downtime during one of music’s biggest drops.
  Massive global traffic hit the site during the release, the new homepage experience, and key announcements, yet it maintained full performance without any downtime

• Real-time preview and website updates
  Sanity’s Live Content API ensured that updates appeared immediately across the site. This is critical for changes to content used on the live website, including CTAs, hero visuals, or new releases, without triggering rebuilds or slowing response times.
• Global CDN delivery
  Content and assets were cached and distributed globally using Sanity’s CDN, which reduced latency and ensured fast performance, regardless of location.

• Decoupled front-end architecture
  Shopify Hydrogen & Oxygen handled the commerce experience, while Sanity powered all content delivery. This separation ensured that each system could scale independently and maintain performance under load.

Key takeaways for developers and technical leaders

Lady Gaga’s digital team moved from static, hard-coded pages to a flexible, scalable platform that supports constant iteration, creative freedom, and operational efficiency. Their success shows what’s possible when development teams prioritize structured content and editorial empowerment.

• For developers: Sanity’s API-first approach ensures full control over content structures, making it easy to integrate with front-end frameworks like Hydrogen.
• For content teams: The live preview, organized content releases, and structured workflows allow for rapid, confident updates without engineering bottlenecks.
• For DevOps & IT teams: Sanity’s fully managed infrastructure, global CDN, and Live Content API enabled fast, reliable delivery at scale, without the need for custom infrastructure or manual scaling.

By rethinking what an artist’s website could be, Lady Gaga’s team built a digital experience that’s as expressive and dynamic as the artist herself.

Sanity features used:

• Sanity Connect for Shopify
• Structured content and content re-use (Content Lake)
• Real-time Collaboration & Live Preview → Content teams saw instant previews before publishing, ensuring accuracy.
• Studio Customization → Allowed content editors to create and edit structured content without dev support.
• Modular Page Building & Custom Components → Empowered the team to build pages using structured content with components.
• Content Releases & Version Control → Enabled precise launch timing for album drops.

Questions from the community—answered

During the live webinar, we had a very lively Q&A in the chat. Below are some of the most common questions from attendees, along with how the team responded based on the project experience.

What is the custom coding method used for the experience?

All custom frontend components (like the mood picker and interactive music pages) were built in React and registered inside Sanity Studio. Each component had a paired content model, allowing non-technical users to manage it independently.

How does the mobile experience differ from the desktop?

The frontend was built with Shopify Hydrogen and designed responsively from the ground up. While the content structure is consistent, layout behaviors (like animations and navigation) were adapted for mobile-first usability. The team tested content appearance across breakpoints in real-time using Sanity’s live preview.

Does the UI application fetch products through Shopify or through Sanity?

Both. Shopify remains the source of truth for product data (pricing, inventory), while Sanity handles enriched editorial content. At runtime, Hydrogen pulls from both to create a unified experience.

Are you using Sanity Connect for Shopify?

Yes. Sanity Connect is used to sync products and collections into Content Lake, allowing the editorial team to expand them with content and media assets.

How did you maintain design consistency while enabling creative freedom?

The team designed it within reusable modules to keep delivery fast and stable. Creative freedom was retained, but guardrails helped reduce complexity and support continuous releases.

Can content authors really publish without dev support?

Yes. The Lady Gaga team, most of whom had never used a CMS before, now manages content in Sanity independently. Real-time previews and guardrails give them confidence to publish without dev handholding.

What feature from Sanity has made the biggest impact?

The biggest impact came from how well core features work together—real-time preview, structured content, schema-as-code, GROQ, and Studio customization. Together, they gave the team the flexibility to move fast, build custom workflows, and empower content editors without slowing down development.