UnitedMasters scales catalog management and licensing with Synchtank

Using Synchtank, UnitedMasters brings technical edge to its services and maximizes revenue for artists with automated licensing at scale.

About the customer:

UnitedMasters was founded in 2017 by industry heavyweight Steve Stoute with a mission to put all the services a label provides in a single app.

Known for its tech-driven approach, it empowers artists to create and earn on their own terms with a suite of tools including music distribution, data analytics, and promotion. It also facilitates unique partnerships between artists and the world’s biggest brands.

Challenges and goals:

UnitedMasters are renowned for providing value-add opportunities to artists and leveraging technology to facilitate this. However, they found their existing catalog management platform to be rigid and uncustomizable.

“We were using another popular platform,” explains Head of Marketplace Dan Hostetler. “It was fine, but we really needed much more control and customization to the product we were putting out there. That was really the impetus for switching.”

UnitedMasters needed a flexible, high-performance solution that could help them manage their content at scale and showcase it in an impactful way. Additionally, they were looking to maximize revenue generation for artists by scaling their music licensing.

“We want to create more opportunities for independent artists,” says Hostetler. “We often refer to ourselves as ‘A Record Label in your Pocket’, and we see sync representation as a critical piece of that model. We need to provide this service at scale to thousands of artists.”

The solution:

Extensive catalog management

The Synchtank platform provides a centralized foundation for UnitedMasters’ catalog management, allowing them to efficiently manage large volumes of content and enrich assets with automated metadata tagging.

Through their dedicated Synchtank website they can now showcase content more effectively and tell the story behind each artist. “We want to expose our customers not only to the music but also, who the artist is, who their fans are, what they post about on social media,” says Hostetler. “Synchtank gives us the power to do that.”

AI enhanced search and curation

Playlisting plays a key role for UnitedMasters, whether it’s creating themed playlists for their homepage or curating and sharing out bespoke playlists for individual briefs, pitches, and customers, all of which they manage using Synchtank.

Curation is enhanced by AI-powered search including the ability to find songs based on reference tracks. “We can say, hey, we know this song matches the brief. What are the other 10 or 20 songs that we can add to that playlist that sound really sonically similar? That’s really powerful for us,” explains Hostetler.

These tools empower UnitedMasters to respond to briefs faster and super-serve their customers with a collaborative platform. “There’s a lot of ‘playlist pitching tools’ out there. What’s nice about Synchtank is that it marries the playlist to the browsability,” adds Hostetler.

Content monetization at scale 

UnitedMasters’ number one goal is to generate more revenue for artists. Synchtank’s e-commerce tool enables anyone to purchase a license for a track directly from their site, allowing them to effortlessly service their rapidly growing inbounds.

“The self-serve licensing saves us a lot of time. We use it as our official accounting system when a song is licensed, so even if we do a deal outside the system, we still go into Synchtank to ‘purchase’ the song for that client so we have all the reporting,” says Hostetler.

To supercharge their sync business further, UnitedMasters have launched a Synchtank-powered subscription service which offers their vast library of cleared tracks to YouTubers, brands, and other creators for $50/month. “It’s huge”, says Hostetler. “When you can use technology to scale the revenue side, it means we can pay artists more.”

Controllable permissions

Synchtank’s Collections feature allows UnitedMasters to package up their catalog in different ways for different users and opportunities. “Being able to segment customers that way and allow them to see exactly the right thing at the right time is great,” explains Hostetler.

Segmenting their catalog, for example into pre-cleared and clearable tracks, brings a huge amount of efficiency to their high-priority brand and sync activities. “We use Synchtank to keep all of that organized and then pitch it and monetize it in different ways,” says Hostetler.

An integrated, flexible system

Integrating Synchtank with their existing systems has helped UnitedMasters to simplify operations. “It’s really helped us organizationally more than anything. Having an integration with Stripe so we can have direct checkout, for example, really streamlines things on the revenue side,” comments Hostetler.

Data from the system is also used to inform reporting to artists in the UnitedMasters app. “A platform like Synchtank with our model is great because you can handle the volume of supply we have and give us back all the data we need to communicate with our artists,” he adds.

Overall, as Hostetler explains, UnitedMasters is delighted by Synchtank’s ability to meet its needs. “The flexibility that Synchtank has really helps us to make integrations easier. One of the best things about Synchtank is they can do almost anything we ask them to.”