In The Groove Music has been creating music for television, advertising, and media since 1996. Their tracks show up in NFL broadcasts, NCAA March Madness coverage, ABC/Disney news packages, and Golf Channel programming. Over three decades, they’ve built a catalog of more than 45,000 tracks, spanning composers from Minneapolis to Korea, Germany, and the Faroe Islands.
But knowing what all that music was actually doing for the business?
That was a different problem.
The challenge: data everywhere, answers nowhere
Jack Swift, Controller and Business Manager at In The Groove, is the person leadership turns to when they need numbers. How much did we spend on that release? What’s it earning? Should we invest more in this genre?
Before Knowi, answering those questions meant pulling an Excel export from one system, running a report from QuickBooks in another, and cross-referencing manually.
“A lot of it was, ‘Can I get an Excel spreadsheet of what this is doing?’ or ‘Can I get a report out of QuickBooks for how much this costs?’” Jack says. “Certainly not all in one place like our Knowi platform does now.”
Their publishing data – track metadata, royalty statements, licensing records – lived in a proprietary FileMaker (Claris) database that the team had spent years building out. Accounting data sat in QuickBooks. Opportunity tracking was in a CRM called Daylight. None of it talked to each other in a way that gave leadership a clear picture.
The turning point: build custom tools or find a platform
The conversation had been building for a couple of years. The company was at a crossroads: invest another $50,000 in custom reporting tools built on top of their existing systems, tools that would need months of testing and revision or find a platform that could connect to what they already had.
“We were at a point where it’s like, okay, do we invest another $50,000 to start building out more reporting tools? Or is there a platform we can use now, at a lower cost, that can integrate with our different APIs and give us answers right away?”
They evaluated a custom Salesforce solution alongside Knowi. Two factors tipped the decision: price and responsiveness.
“One was the price. The other was just the availability of people at Knowi. If we had a question or concern, or needed a dashboard built, it’s been very good response times. The Knowi team has been pretty on top of it whenever we need something.”
What Knowi does for the business
Today, In The Groove uses Knowi across six dashboards and three regular users to answer the questions that drive their business:
Revenue vs. cost per release.
By connecting their publishing database and accounting data, Knowi shows profit margins on individual music releases. ITG team can see what a release costs to produce versus what it’s earned, across all revenue streams including licensing fees and royalties from performing rights organizations and mechanical licensing collectives.
“We were able to go through basically all of our albums and get a pretty accurate depiction of how much a release has made. That was good in determining, using a base set of criteria, what the profit margin is for us.”
Setting the annual music investment budget.
The revenue-vs-cost analysis directly informed how much In The Groove Music allocates each year to new music projects. Instead of guessing, they can point to data.
“It helped us determine an annual budget number for our music projects this year.”
Catalog performance tracking.
With 45,000+ tracks spanning 30 years, knowing which music is still generating revenue and which isn’t is critical. Knowi surfaces historical trends that would be impossible to spot in spreadsheets.
“It’s interesting to see things like, ‘Oh, this was a song made in 2009 that’s still being used out in the world.’ It kind of helps us determine what releases, what genres, what products go best with a certain sound.”
Identifying underperformers.
Just as valuable as knowing what works is knowing what doesn’t. ITG team can flag releases where the investment hasn’t paid off.
“In a lot of cases, it eliminates guesswork – okay, we spent $3,000 on this release, and it’s only made $1,000 in the last four years.”
Opportunity tracking.
Knowi also serves a lightweight CRM function, helping the team track where search queries for their business are coming from, who the clients are and what the potential budgets look like for incoming projects.
Visual dashboards for non-technical leadership
One of the biggest wins has been giving the ITG team, who prefer visual representations over spreadsheets, a way to actually engage with the data.
“The team here likes the visual representations of data rather than just looking at it on a spreadsheet. That’s been really helpful for them.”
When a question comes up in a leadership meeting, Jack and team can go to Knowi and come back with an answer – not in a day, but in minutes.
“My leadership will come to me with a question. All right, let me go to Knowi and see if I can answer that. And then just giving them an answer based on what Knowi is telling me.”
The role of Knowi’s team
In The Groove isn’t a company with data engineers on staff. They’re 13 people whose primary job is making music. The technical side – writing queries, building dashboards, setting up integrations – is handled by Knowi’s team.
“Knowi team is super responsive, creative. They are very knowledgeable, very quick. They make screen-record videos like, ‘Go here, then here, and then you can export this or view this data differently.’ The service has been great.”
Jack sees this hands-on support as a differentiator, especially for a small business without a dedicated analytics team.
“Service, I think, in a lot of different tools and platforms like this, will help separate companies. At least in terms of retaining clients.”
What’s next
In The Groove is currently looking to add Salesforce and plans to integrate Salesforce with Knowi in the coming months, extending the same unified analytics approach to their new CRM data.
They’ve also grown from their initial dashboard setup to six dashboards and counting, adding new views as new business questions come up.
“A lot of this is still, there’s just a ton of information within the platform. We’ve added three or four more dashboards than we initially came in with, just kind of building on different questions we want to ask of our data.”
