How Score a Score established seamless team collaboration with DISCO
By: Tim B
Tags: Music Supervision, Music Industry, Workflow, Disco Libraries, Music Sync

How Score a Score established seamless team collaboration with DISCO

Caze Taylor shares how the music company solved their storage issues and workflow snags, onboarded new team members, and more with DISCO Tim B Follow Jun 17 · 6 min read

Score a Score’s Marchese (Caze) Taylor

Score a Score specializes in custom and licensed music for pictures, as well as music supervision. They simplify the collaboration process between directors, composers, and producers for ads, trailers, film, and TV. With a focus on advertising and trailers, they’ve worked with brands like Apple, Microsoft, Pizza Hut, Netflix, LinkedIn, among many others.

Score a Score’s Director of Creative Operations, Marchese (Caze) Taylor, who’s seen the team grow from five to twelve people over the past five years, took the time to talk to us about how they use DISCO. With a large roster of composers, she creates, oversees, and manages many of the company’s systems and operations. Here’s a peek into what that looks like.

Tight timelines in advertising require effective file syncing

Score a Score works on ads, so they’re used to tight timelines and fast-paced work. “As a general philosophy at our company, we’re known for being very fast and very flexible. Even if a client gives us a deadline of tomorrow, someone is usually starting it right now and delivering it in the next hour or two,” Caze told us.

She continued, “With fast-paced workflows, little snags are inevitable. For example, with our old system, if a composer wanted to remove a track from our library (maybe because they sold the exclusive rights), one person on our team might remove it, but the rest didn’t get the memo. If someone pitched that track unknowingly, all these tiny things could go wrong. I’m a little type-A, my colleagues might say, and I just couldn’t deal with that.”

Score a Score’s show reel

Piecemeal systems and data limits don’t scale

Caze describes their old system as “unsustainable,” telling a common tale of a Franken-system that didn’t scale as the team grew. Before DISCO, each creative received MP3 attachments or links to download files in response to their briefs, then saved them to their hard drive or computer, opened them in iTunes, added tags, contact info, etc.

They’d put them in a folder on Finder, zip it up, upload it to Hightail, and then send that to the client. They each had a hard drive full of pitch folders, sometimes 50-plus copies of the same track because it kept getting added to different folders. “It was a little bit all over the place, but it felt like it worked at the time,” Caze reflected.

As the team grew one person at a time, everyone kept doing it that way until it became unsustainable. She added, “I might not have had all the same tracks that so-and-so had on their hard drive because they collected that search, and I never got looped in. The general disjointedness and disorganization became an issue, especially when it came to representing our composers. If we don’t have everything by that composer available to each of us, that’s not ideal for any of our artists, which is ultimately who we’re working for.”

iTunes can only hold so much data so they’d have to clear it out and save everything on external hard drives. She described their workflow as “a lot of uploading and downloading constantly all day. That takes time and wastes energy, and created limitations around resolution. We’d only save MP3s of everything because we didn’t want to take up a ton of space with WAVs and AIFFss. If a client needed a hi-res file and we couldn’t get a hold of the composer, it turned into a much bigger issue.”

Why DISCO was the answer

The Score a Score team grew big enough that their old, pieced-together system and its data limits didn’t work for them. They needed a program that allowed for asynchronous collaboration and that would streamline their workflow so they could focus on the creative aspect of their jobs and delivering on those tight timelines. DISCO offered a library, communication tool, and cloud storage solution all in one program.

Caze shared, “We could tell DISCO would help us be more collaborative. We could all work from the exact same library on the cloud, pretty much solving our data and storage issues. But what really stood out to me was the way you can navigate through the platform. You can click on a song in a playlist and see every other playlist it’s in. That was a very organic transition from how we already searched our own hard drives.”

She added, “Having tracks associated with groups of other tracks makes everything so fast for us. We can name tracks according to our system and add genre and style tags for upbeat, etc. Having that central system of what everyone is working on has been so helpful.”

Adapting to DISCO as a team

As a type-A, Caze set her team up for success in using DISCO. She shared, “I’ve created a collection of guidebooks for each and every one of our systems and software programs we use so that there’s always a reference. When we’re training someone new for the first week or two, we’ll slowly go through one guidebook at a time together.”

Covered in their DISCO guidebook are things like:

sending out blasts to the roster

ingesting new material from the inboxes into a submissions channel

creating and sending pitch playlists

placing pitch playlists in a pitching channel and

data backups of every channel every month into their ingestion spreadsheet.

Caze further reflected, “Over the years, we’ve developed a number of other systems within DISCO to manage tracks we own versus tracks we represent but don’t own, as well as the license history of every track.”

Caze’s favorite DISCO features

Inboxes: “We have different inboxes for different types of projects and different requests. We can include notes to the composers within the inbox so we don’t need to reiterate them elsewhere because they’ll pop up when someone opens it. For example, we can tell composers what format to send their files in or instructions to include stems. We have inboxes for general submissions, searches, stems, and so on.”

Customer service: “The DISCO team is super helpful and easy to work with. They’ve helped us with custom metadata fields, coming up with systems at the very beginning, the initial mass upload, and the first wave of merging dupes. That was wildly helpful. That was the big first step we couldn’t accomplish on our own.”

Crossing DISCO over to music supervision

Music supervision hasn’t been Score a Score’s main focus, but the team has started taking on more supervision projects. She shared what it’s been like using DISCO for those.

“I’m just now using DISCO for a supervision project on a Netflix show we are music supervising. I wish I had used it before. I copied some of the systems I developed in our original DISCO that was already imprinted in my workflow. It worked well for sending a search and collecting tracks all in one place, then collecting all of my favorites in a different channel. I still have my submissions channel and pitches channel where I track everything I’ve received and when, and everything I send and when; that was a good crossover system for me.”

How Score a Score uses DISCO Libraries

Score a Score is using DISCO Libraries to create a public catalog showcasing their composers’ work. Caze shared, “Our idea of a public-facing catalog is something like Source Audio, which we also use mainly for our trailer clients. DISCO Libraries are much smoother; I like how everything is in one place.” Their plan is to “take all of our new stuff each month, trim it down to the essentials, and add them to the public catalog for our clients on a monthly basis.”

Using DISCO for remote collaboration during the pandemic

Being based in LA, seamless remote collaboration has become crucial to the Score a Score team. Here’s how DISCO has helped.

“The pandemic has made everything so different, but DISCO makes collaborating easy. Someone on the team will let us know if they’re working on a project via g-chat. Then, even if I’m working on something else, I can keep that in mind. If I come across something that could be a good fit, all I have to do is share our public DISCO link with my team member. Or, when we’re working on a project together, I can pull songs for 20 minutes. When I have to hop off, I can hit save and someone else can open it up and finish it off. It’s seamless.”

Curious how DISCO can help your team collaborate seamlessly?

Send us a note at support@disco.ac and we’ll be happy to help.