How Composer Kevin Richardson Uses DISCO to Organize A Catalog Of 1,100-Plus Tracks
Kevin Richardson is a songwriter, producer, and composer based in Huntsville, Alabama. Originally from Long Island, Kevin grew up listening to everything from soul and Motown to gospel and hip-hop. As a kid, he learned piano but soon graduated to rebuilding radio hits via the audio software FL Studio on a hand-me-down computer.
As an in-demand composer, Kevin’s music has appeared on Love Is Blind (seasons one through four), Below Deck and its many spin-offs, Vanderpump Villas, Nikita on the CW, and content across Netflix, HBO, Bravo, MTV, VH1, ESPN, and Roku. He also manages a catalog of over 1,100 original tracks, which he organizes using DISCO.
"There are so many things being thrown at you as a creator — new products, new technology, try this, try that. It can feel overwhelming," he says. "But in that sea of options, there are crucial ones you should pay attention to. DISCO is one of those."
"If you make music and you want it organized, DISCO has features that are intentionally there to make a creator's job easier — the Lyric Transcription, the Similarity Search, the auto-tagging, the EPK presentation,” Kevin adds. “All of it is designed to save you time. That way, you can save the time for what you love most, which is make music."
Kevin opened up to DISCO a bit more about the platform tools that simplify his creative and organizational process. "DISCO is the way. I'll leave it at that," he says.
Making The Big Move To DISCO
In Kevin’s earliest days of file management, he used floppy disks (remember those) for storage. As the internet grew and evolved, he tried other cloud-based services, but struggled with the storage limitations, which he tried to circumvent with a bunch of external hard drives. If a music supervisor reached out, he’d struggle to think which platform or device certain tracks were stored. "I imagine a video of me juggling my laptop, my external hard drives, and a SoundCloud account all at the same time," he says. "That was really my file management situation.”
Then, about seven years ago, a music supervisor turned him on to DISCO. Later, a second supervisor said that more and more of the industry was moving over to the file-storage platform – DISCO was quickly becoming the primary method for music supervisors to send and receive music files. "That gave me a lot of motivation," Kevin says. "I was like, I want to follow what she's doing, because I want my music on these projects."
About three or four years ago, Kevin consolidated his entire 1,100-plus track catalog into DISCO, where he built a tagging system. "It went from a hodgepodge of file management to everything being streamlined and easy," he says. "It's beautiful."
"DISCO allows you to present yourself like you're wearing a three-piece suit"
After moving his full catalog over to DISCO, Kevin began tinkering with Album Pages, which are stylized playlists with customizable imagery. (Album pages can be a full album, an EP, or a single release.)
He creates custom cover art for every track, adds a background image to each playlist, includes detailed metadata describing a track’s mood and feel, and sends a link that renders all of it cleanly and professionally. "DISCO allows you to present yourself like you're wearing a three-piece suit," he says. "Everything is clean. You don't have to wonder if the link is legitimate."
Kevin adds: "I imagine it as if I'm handing someone a Michelin-star-status presentation," he says. "And it only takes the amount of effort I want to put into it."
“DISCO lets a track name actually get discovered instead of buried"
Kevin is extremely intentional about metadata. Every track he imports into DISCO gets annotated with the necessary information, including genre, tempo, and mood. This way, when a supervisor requests something specific, he’s able to find it immediately. In an industry where “everything is needed yesterday,” Kevin says he saves a lot of time searching through his own catalog via DISCO.
Kevin is also deliberate about naming tracks in a way that will grab a supervisor’s attention. "If I name my tracks really weird things, that'll catch the supervisor's eye," he says. "And DISCO lets that track name actually get discovered instead of buried."
“Lyric Transcription is definitely going in my workflow”
Kevin started using DISCO’s Lyric Transcription tool when a placement opportunity arose for a song he’d co-written, and the supervisor needed lyrics. At the moment, Kevin wasn’t sure where he’d put the lyrics, and his songwriting collaborator couldn’t immediately send them either. He pulled up the song in question in his catalog and hit “transcribe” in DISCO.
He says: "It was quick. I went through it really fast and thought, oh man, it's perfect. Saved it, pushed it to the supervisor, and she responded in three minutes. The whole thing — five minutes of mild panic, then DISCO solving it in under a minute — happened in about twelve minutes total. That feature is definitely going in my workflow."
"Similarity Search means we can just use the reference, find what's similar, and sift through maybe 20 tracks instead of 1,000. That saves a lot of time"
A lot of the time in music supervision, the supervisor will have a reference track already in mind, but for whatever reason (cost, availability), they are unable to license that exact one. In the past, if Kevin was sent a brief that uses a reference track, he would have to use his own memory to think of a song in his catalog with a similar sound. "A lot of times I can't remember the name of the track. I know I have something similar to what was requested, but I can't remember what I called it," he says.
With DISCO’s Similarity Search tool, Kevin can paste the YouTube link of the reference track directly into DISCO, and the platform will mine his entire catalog for matches, using tempo, mood, texture, and returns a shortlist of options.
"As composers and producers and sound designers, we're always trying to remember that one track," he says. "This technology means we can just use the reference, find what's similar, and sift through maybe twenty tracks instead of a thousand. That saves a lot of time."
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