“Why would I choose Magnetracks for my music company over another product like Harvest Media, SourceAudio, SynchTank or Songspace? What makes it different?”.

– a frustrated music licensing company

We’ve heard this question many times, and it’s a natural inquiry, because it seems like there are already several well-established products for creative companies small and trying to manage a large or growing music catalog.

I’d answer that by sharing a question I would be emailed as a publisher from our writers all the time. “What’s the status of my track, ‘INSERT_NAME_HERE’?” There’s actually a bunch of smaller questions wrapped up in that larger one:

1. My publishing deal about to expire. Have you represented it well enough for me to renew?
2. Has it been licensed by anyone yet?
3. Where has it been pitched and when, and how many times?
4. Do you have any statistics on plays, downloads, likes?
5. Is it registered with my performing rights society?
6. Through which distributors is it available?
7. Can you share any licensing activity details with me?
8. What albums or catalogs is it a part of?

Where would you look to answer those questions? Do you even have the ability to answer them?

If you had nothing else to do, you could go into each one of the online platforms and offline platforms (uh, paper) to piece together part of the story. Then you’d need to hunt through old emails, meeting notes, DropBox, and playlists. This is of course all very time-consuming, and very counter-productive to actually driving new business for your catalog. So instead, the reply to the inquiring writer would be a half-truth like, “we don’t have that kind of information for you right now.”.

But it would actually bother me that I wasn’t able to give very basic information like this. Coming from outside the music world, I knew that in business-level software platforms from the big boys (like SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, etc.), reporting and the ability to get deep insights about your “assets” were absolute cornerstone features. Gaining a deep understanding of your customers, products and inventory planning are a given. And aren’t songs our assets, albums our packaging, and a catalog our inventory?

This blind spot made me uneasy. It’s unacceptable that the average small publisher like me didn’t have access to these kinds of tools.

An enterprise-level approach to managing music

The real problem is that there simply hasn’t been one single solution capture the entire history of a single track in your catalog; from initial agreement, through release, marketing, licensing and ongoing relationship building. Instead there are standalone music solutions that focus specifically on your catalog and its distribution, but ignore the other aspects of your business. They provide no simple solution for:

1. Customer relationship management (CRM).
2. Document management
3. Sales Opportunities and Quoting
4. Project Planning and management
5. Email and Social campaigns.
6. Providing rightsholder portal access.

At Magnetracks, we look at things with a substantially wider-angle lens. We believe that monetizing music is only the outcome of a heck of a lot of behind-the-scenes activity that had to happen correctly FIRST. If you’ve never seen the now-classic infographic provided by Daniel Holter of PMA member library The License Lab, you’ll immediately have an appreciation for the amount of effort needed to get one track to the marketplace.

So to finally answer the “Why Magnetracks?” question, it is because Magnetracks is your answer to managing all the other activity surrounding your music that others miss, providing a platform on which to truly grow and run your business – not a pieced together patchwork.

All that busy-work that is just as important in getting new music to market, protecting your rights, and measuring your success, is part of the Magnetracks solution.

Watch a complete tour of the Magnetracks platform here.

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Contact us directly at info@magnetracks.com.