Our Favorite Sync Licensing Tool for 2018

Our Search for THE ONE
One questions we get asked a lot is about what tools we use to manage our songs and keep our pitching organized. I will say, we researched and tried out a LOT of services; well over 15 different companies all aiming to be the solution for independent labels, licensing agents and music supervisors. A lot of the known players like Synchtank, Soundgizmo, and SourceAudio are out of budget for most start-ups or solo operations. Furthermore, the design and user experience for most are bulky and not something I was proud to send to clients.

Warning: I’m about to sound like a fanboy but I’m not an employee nor am I compensated by Disco. However, after literally years of searching and easily spending over a 100 hours testing options, it’s understandable that I’d want to gush a bit when I finally find “the one.”

Do You Disco?
When I was first introduced to Disco, a music catalog manager and pitching app, I couldn’t believe that one company had finally hit all the notes I was looking for. Disco was designed from the ground up by music supervisors for music supervisors. It was initially used as an internal tool for their team to pitch music, keep track of those pitches, organize playlists, manage metadata, and collaborate with other members of their group. They soon saw the hole in the market for an easy to use catalog manager that didn’t forget about aesthetics! And so, Disco was offered to the public.

What’s Love Got to Do With It
One of the big missing features in other services was an elegant way to pitch your playlists. Soundcloud had a nice looking player but you couldn’t easily share hi-res and MP3 files with it. Box, Dropbox and the rest are okay but quickly auditioning songs is not easy and you can’t check the lyrics while listening to a song.

ENTER DISCO…
With Disco you can customize each of the playlists you send out with background images and custom logos/artwork. All of the playlists allow the end user to download MP3’s, WAV/AIF or both! Within the same one page playlist they can also view lyrics without interrupting the music player and you can add custom notes (ie – “this artist is on tour with John Mayer” or “this is a cover song but we’ve cleared it easily in the past”).

All of the playlists you send out can be assigned unique URL’s that are linked to the emails of the person you’re sending them too (or you can send them directly using Disco’s internal email form). All of which can be tracked and instantly reported with Disco’s analytics. You can see immediately when someone has opened your playlist, streamed or downloaded a song or downloaded the entire playlist!

One of the coolest features is that you can upload just one hi-res file and Disco will automatically create a MP3 version. No more managing separate MP3 and hi-res files!

Take It to the Outro
I could go on and on about my favorite features (not to mention the fact they they are remarkably better priced that any of the other options out there), but if you’re interested I would highly suggest you contact the fine folks at Disco and set up a one-on-one walkthrough. When I did my Skype one-on-one they made specific suggestions on how to organize my catalog for the specific work we do at 3 Theory Music and it literally eliminated 2 spreadsheets I was using to keep track of where my music was going and where it had been. Give Disco a try and let me know what you think! Find us on Twitter –> @3Theory.

*If you found any value from this post, we’d appreciate you using our Disco affiliate link  (it saves us a bit off our annual subscription and every little bit helps).