Sound Search #1: Katrina Balcius, DISCO

Katrina Balcius has been on both sides of the music tech conversation. She’s pitched music, organized catalogs, and dealt with the friction that comes when great tracks can’t be found fast enough. Now, as Head of Enterprise at DISCO, she spends her time with the labels, publishers, and sync teams navigating that same challenge at scale.

We talked to Katrina about what she’s learned working with music companies across the industry: where the real inefficiencies live, how technology is shifting daily workflows, and why the way we search for music is overdue for a reset.

How did you end up working at the intersection of music and technology?

It kind of just fell into my lap. I started working in tech in San Francisco in 2012, but I quickly realized the part of tech I was in wasn’t exciting to me. I’ve always loved music, obsessively. So I started interning at a licensing company while I still had my tech job, learning about rights, pitching, the art and science of it.

That company ended up switching to DISCO, and that was my first introduction to it. We’d been using a legacy tool that made everything harder to scale, and when we switched to DISCO it was like, “Oh, this is so intuitive and easy.”

My approach has always been the same: if it’s that intersection of what I’m good at, what I love, and what I can bring to the company, I just say, “Can I work for you?” And usually the timing aligns. That’s what happened with DISCO. I’d been in the shoes of our customers, and that made all the difference.

There’s a bit of skepticism around tech in the world I grew up in. But once I realized that most people in this space are really trying to solve something meaningful, I found my sweet spot. They’re all music lovers who care about this industry continuing to thrive and making sure artists and their teams can keep making money doing what they love.

You work with a lot of music teams. What surprised you when you first started?

How much music was just sitting there, waiting to be found. These companies are sitting on incredibly valuable music, whether on the publishing or master side. That's their gold nugget. But so often, the audio files weren't easily accessible, or they were in a system that made it hard to put them to work. Great songs that could have landed a sync or been reimagined just weren't getting the chance. That was the pattern everywhere I looked, and it's a big part of what got me excited about what technology could do for these teams.

How has technology changed the way music professionals actually work?

Teams are able to scale and be more efficient, especially as global organizations. In practice, that means people can actually find almost every piece of music they own. Before, it was a lot of memory, historical knowledge, and metadata, which is often wrong or incomplete.

From the sync perspective, but also A&R: so many songs are being written every day, and there are amazing songs just collecting dust. For an A&R person to go back 10 or 15 years into their catalog and actually surface something is really huge. We’re seeing more older songs getting new life.

Teams are also able to share more broadly. Think about the majors with their million-track catalogs, doing local signings in each territory. Now, a team member can put ten new signings in a playlist and share it within three minutes to the entire organization, with context about the new writers and their songs. That instantly creates a much bigger footprint for those artists. If someone in another territory gets a brief and thinks, “Oh, that Norwegian writer actually fits this” — that only happened because sharing was easy. You’re creating opportunities for someone who probably wouldn’t have gotten one before.

Does that raise the bar for what people expect from technology?

People have always wanted things yesterday, but now there’s almost no excuse not to be fast. You have most of it at your fingertips and should be able to deliver what you need.

Whether that’s AI stems, pulling out vocals, getting lyrics for someone quickly. You don’t have to wait a day and a half to reach out to the manager, to reach out to the artist, to transcribe lyrics.

The way I think about it is: let’s embrace technology for the things that save us time and make us money, without taking away from the creative integrity of making music. Let technology handle the administrative tasks, and free people up for the work that matters.

What patterns are you seeing in how teams work with their catalogs right now?

The thing I get really excited about as a music nerd is seeing catalogs being dug up and presented on these beautiful gold platters, giving producers, managers, and artists access to reimagine songs.

I love a good sample. The familiarity, the nostalgia. And most rights holders are actually making the majority of their revenue from back catalog, not frontline. What’s exciting is giving people the ability to dig through what exists digitally, for it to be reimagined. Forgotten songs, or songs you didn’t even know existed, being surfaced and given new creative life. People are doing this more and more, using tools like DISCO and AIMS to find that music.

The other big trend is what some of the majors are doing around aggregating local signings. Someone’s job is to go to Sweden, Korea, Canada, find out who the local signings are, and share that with the wider organization. It makes the whole company stronger and more connected.

What practical advice would you give teams who want to get the most out of tools like AIMS?

The way you’ve been searching for the last decade or two — you’ve got to stop. We have to retrain our brains and move beyond keywords. There’s a time and place for them, sure. But if we really want to get the most out of a catalog, you have to treat the search almost like a person you’re having a conversation with.

If you come to me and say, “Hey, we need to find music — happy, thematic, 120 BPM,” cool, but I actually have no context on what it’s for. If you want someone’s help, you’re going to give them context, clarity, and as much information as possible.

So it’s like: “Hey, we got this brief for a Coca-Cola ad, it’s going to run in the summer. Think summer, bright, happy, active — something that makes people feel a certain way.” When you include that context, what it’s for, the mood, even the outcome of how you want people to feel, you get dramatically better results.

This is a moment in the music industry where we have to evolve with how things are progressing. The tools have changed, and how we interact with them needs to change too.

If there’s one thing you wish every music company thought more deeply about when it comes to technology, what would it be?

So many music teams build their own tech stack, which is fine to a degree. But you’re a music company, not a tech company. Leave some of the technology infrastructure to the teams that are eating, sleeping, and breathing that work every day.

Let us integrate with what you have. Don’t spend so much time reinventing the wheel when companies like AIMS, DISCO, and the rest of your music tech stack can all work together.

The way I think about it is: let the pipes connect. If the pipes are all connected, everything flows better, and everyone can focus on what they actually do best, which is music.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sound Search is AIMS' interview series with music professionals on how technology is changing the way we discover and work with music.

Have someone in mind we should talk to? Reach out to us on LinkedIn.