Position Music Changes The Game With Turn-Key Approach
By: Melanie Mabugat-Wagner
Tags: Toneden, Case Study, Artist Marketing, Facebook Advertising, Record Label

Position Music is not your average music company. You’ve probably heard their placements in some of these iconic film campaigns: Tomb Raider, Wonder Woman, Transformers, Deadpool, The Hobbit—the list goes on. Their TV resume is no different, with Grey’s Anatomy, Homeland, Big Bang Theory, and that’s just scratching the surface. What initially started as a music library curating and creating (and now most recently, recording in-house) music for television, films, trailers, and advertisements, Position Music has grown into something so much bigger.

Getting your music placed in film and TV is a game-changer in any artists’ career but also one of the most difficult to achieve. There’s so many gatekeepers, decision-makers, and executives who are involved in the journey of getting a song placed, not to mention the competition.

Why not streamline that bureaucratic process and bridge the gap with a fully integrated, artist-centric approach? Position Music saw a deeper need to support artists in all aspects of the media landscape — so it was only natural for them to evolve into a record label and management team, as well.

Paul Crary, Digital Marketing Manager, has been with Position Music for almost a year now. He oversees digital marketing for an expansive artist roster that includes Dead Posey, TeaMarrr, Welshy Arms, and Judah & The Lion, to name a few. In addition to handling A&R, he works with the artists themselves finely tuning their digital release and promotion strategies to help them reach their fans.

No Agency, No Problem

Hailing from a traditional agency background doing social media engagement strategy at advertising powerhouse Periscope, “I was overseeing all the social media for Buffalo Wild Wings. It was crazy — 15 million fans and 24/7 monitoring of the accounts,” says Crary. “It was pretty cool having big budgets. We’ve spent a lot of money on those posts.” When Position Music brought Crary into the mix, they wanted that competency here for their label services.

Without the horsepower of a major advertising agency behind him, “That’s where ToneDen comes in,” Crary says. In the beginning, “We were using the free version with FanLinks…then slowly but surely, I’m like what more could this do?” He started exploring the more premium services that ToneDen had to offer including features that range from Spotify Pre-Saves and the ability to run advertising campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. Although Position Music had never done anything like this before — using a marketing software tool like this— “From there, it was a pretty easy sell,” says Crary.

Crary is not alone—a dedicated ToneDen campaign strategist had trained the entire office on the platform during on-boarding. Everyone has now been empowered to use the tool as well despite the fact for many, digital marketing is not in their realm. “The level of competency in the company is way higher because of ToneDen,” says Crary. “They log in on their own and I hear them in other meetings when I’m not in there bringing up ToneDen—showing how something is doing, [and] who they’re reaching. It puts a smile on my face.”

When it comes to data, Crary is a self-proclaimed nerd. Coming from an agency background, the ability to aggregate and understand the numbers is at its core, the pathway to driving engagement. Along with easy-to-access one-click settlement reports, one of Crary’s favorite features of the platform are the automated daily status reports. Smart performance reporting on any active campaigns are sent to the team’s inbox every day, improving communication amongst the rest of the internal team, the artists’ themselves, and their managers. Everyone’s happy and in the loop. “I didn’t [even] have to do anything,” Crary laughs.