CTRL After Five Years: Integral Studio’s Upgrade Path

When Megh Vakharia first built a website for SZA in 2017, he chose Vercel and Next.js to match the creative energy of an artist on the rise. Five years later, SZA is a Grammy-nominated superstar, and Integral Studio has expanded its roster to include 21 Savage and Future. To mark the re-release of CTRL—the album that earned SZA five Grammy nominations and a spot on multiple 2017 year-end lists—Integral returned to the same stack.

"The ease of deployment is directly related to the ease of creation—and when both are equal, you can ideate, make, and upload without boundaries, pushing up whatever you want, whenever you want."

Megh Vakharia CEO

Built on Vercel from the Start

Integral began as an agency building direct-to-consumer sites for major artists, eventually branching out to launch SymphonyOS in 2021 for independent musicians without label support. The foundation was laid early: after seeing independent artists gain traction on SoundCloud and companies like Uber and Airbnb succeed, Vakharia recognized the potential at the intersection of music and technology. A Hulu internship introduced him to co-founder Chuka Chase, and one of his first clients was Travis Scott.

When Top Dog Entertainment brought SZA to Integral shortly afterward, the team worked side-by-side with the artist to shape both the website and the album. Vercel's deployment model let them iterate without friction. As Vakharia puts it: "You push one button, 10 keys on the keyboard, press enter, and have a new link to share around."

Even with Next.js 1.2, Vakharia was impressed by the site's speed—critical when CTRL's launch drove millions of views. A traditional server setup might have buckled under that load, but Vercel kept performance consistent.

An Easy Upgrade from Next.js 1.2 to 12.1

Five years later, CTRL remains on the Billboard charts. For the deluxe anniversary release, SZA and Integral had no doubt about the platform. The v1.2 site ran on a custom server that handled routing and data tracking—a system Vakharia now calls over-engineered. The upgrade to Next.js 12.1 meant leaving that custom server behind and simplifying their infrastructure dramatically.

Vakharia: "The landscape has changed a lot in five years, as it tends to do in tech. But with Vercel and Next.js, it was just super easy to push up a website. So we stuck with it and never really looked back."

The migration took two hours. Backwards compatibility was the key: the team changed only 100 to 200 lines of code to move the entire site to the modern framework version.

The deluxe release drew millions of visitors globally, and Vercel's serverless scalability meant no downtime concerns. Vakharia notes the relief of "not hav[ing] to change anything up and still have the same creativity and be able to just use one platform to deploy everything."

Bringing the Agency Model to Independent Artists

Despite the rise of TikTok and Instagram, SZA and Integral remain committed to the Web as a space for community and custom experiences. "It's really the customizability of it all," says Vakharia. "You can really build your own world on the Web."

That conviction drives SymphonyOS, Integral's platform built on Vercel for artists at any scale. The numbers motivate them: of the 10 million artists on Spotify, only 1.1% are signed to labels.

"How do we take everything we've learned from working with major label artists and bring it to the next million artists? That's what Symphony is. There are 10 million artists on Spotify and 1.1% of them are signed to record labels. Symphony empowers the 99% of artists who are independent with the tools to market themselves."

Early results point to the potential. Aaryan Shah, an artist developed through SymphonyOS, saw his TikTok audience grow from 500 to 15,000 followers when his song "Renegade" went viral—and Vercel handled the spike without delays or crashes.

By building on Vercel, Integral can extend its workflow to the next generation of independent musicians: the same deployment simplicity, the same scalability, and the same freedom to create at the moment of inspiration.