How Resister Music Streamlines its Business Across Departments on DISCO
Resister Music is a London-based, female-founded music supervision and composer agency specializing in music and sound for all media, including television, film, and advertising. Some of their highest-profile work has been on 2023's Barbie movie, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, The Flash, Magic Mike, The Batman, American Express, Ebay, Amazon Books, and plenty more. Resister also owns and operates a female and gender-minority composer agency called 515.
DISCO spoke to Resister co-founder and Executive Creative Director Hollie Hutton about getting her start in the sync space, Resister’s mission to spotlight female composers, and how Resister uses DISCO across multiple departments to streamline its workflow.
“We'd been seeing over many years that the same types of people and the same names were winning a lot of the bespoke jobs,” Hollie tells DISCO about why it felt imperative for her and co-founder Hannah Charman to create Resister in 2023. “The composer database that we had been seeing across the board was pretty much 99% men. We really felt like there was a lack of women and diverse people composing for these projects. We wanted to create a place and a platform to amplify those voices. So we set up Resister with the aim to resist the historical lack of women and diverse people in music for all media.”
“Life before DISCO was a messy place to be”
Looking back at what it was like to keep track of music files prior to joining DISCO, Hollie recalls “a lot of random folders everywhere… It was a messy place to be.”
Working across multiple music platforms, Hollie lacked a centralized system to organize her own files as well as share them with colleagues. “It was hard to speak to other supervisors within the team and share things because everyone wanted to share things in a different way,” Hollie says. There wasn't a functional place for everyone to come together and collaborate in real time.
“When DISCO came along, it really did solve that problem and allowed us to have this one functioning workspace that we could all dip into while still maintaining our individual ways of working… I'm in DISCO all day every day.”
Hollie also pointed out that DISCO’s organizational system and tagging capabilities made it easier for her team to locate past work. “A pain point from the pre-DISCO days was doing a piece of work and wanting to think back to it a few years or months later,” she says. “Prior to DISCO, if somebody else wanted to recall a project that I had been working on, it would be in my system and not their system. Being able to have this one place where everything was housed, it was a real game changer and saved a huge amount of time.”
DISCO unites teams to work on a centralized platform
Resister Music comprises a few different layers: There is the main music supervision agency, the composer agency (515), and a music catalog called Ear Heart. “DISCO really helps us pull those three strands of the business together,” Hollie says.
“Ear Heart is an external-facing place where people can search the music we have commissioned for projects or albums. Then we have a big catalog of pre-existing music that composers have already created, and we store that in our DISCO to allow us to search an even wider pool of music whenever we're working on a project to see if there's something that our collaborators have already created that we can work with. It saves so much time to be able to go back on previous projects and pull those into new projects when there's often recurring themes and genres and sounds that we're working with.”
Representing composers with DISCO Pages
As an agency that works with numerous composers, Hollie points to DISCO Artist Pages as a dedicated webpage to house individual musicians’ reels, playlists, photos, videos, bios, and more. “Whenever we get asked to send a show reel from our composers, we dive into DISCO and create a new playlist or send an existing reel. It's a really nice interface to be able to share an artist with all of their work, videos, and images,” Hollie says.
“We use DISCO Pages for our 515 composer roster specifically,” she continues. “We have a page for each of our composers that links directly to our website. When you go on our website, click on the composer, it takes you to their DISCO Page. That has an image, their bio, specific show reels, audio and video, which is super helpful. We also use pages to create specific dedicated reels for projects.”
“The Track Nesting feature has allowed us to present more as a catalog in a useful way to content creators”
DISCO’s Track Nesting feature is a handy way to group all track versions together so they appear under a single Main Track. “The nesting feature has allowed us to present more as a catalog in a useful way to content creators,” Hollie says. “They can see that there are multiple versions of a track readily available. They don't send us multiple emails saying, ‘Can you send me the instrumental and all of the different parts to the track?’ It saves us some time and allows us to present all of the different versions in one go without having to add multiple tracks to a playlist.”
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