Team is a release management platform built to bring visibility, orchestration and operational control to modern music rollouts. It replaces the spreadsheets, Slack threads, shared drives and email chains that labels, managers and artists use to coordinate releases with a single source of truth for the entire release lifecycle. Studio Nine is Team’s end-to-end marketing function, working alongside the founders from pre-launch through active growth. Studio Nine founder Simon Lodge serves as CMO, leading every part of the marketing programme, from positioning and brand to organic, paid, partnerships and growth infrastructure.
The challenge
Modern release campaigns are operationally chaotic. Every release touches a dozen tools, ten stakeholders and no shared visibility. The opportunity is not to ship another productivity tool; it is to define an entirely new category: the release operating system. That means building the strategic narrative, the brand, the digital surface, the demand engine and the growth infrastructure in parallel, while the product itself is still being shaped. Music is also a category that does not respond to generic SaaS marketing. Trust is earned through specificity, fluency and credibility inside the industry, not louder messaging.
Our role
Studio Nine is not a marketing department bolted onto Team. Marketing is being built into the company. Go-to-market is the wrapper, and inside it sits the whole programme: brand and messaging, organic and paid, partnerships, content, web and the systems that hold it all together. The work spans every surface a high-performing in-house team would own, run at startup speed.
Category & positioning
Team is being positioned as the release operating system: a new category framed around visibility, orchestration and operational control, rather than feature comparison with generic project tools.
Brand & messaging
We are developing the core brand from the ground up, the visual identity, narrative system, value-proposition architecture and the language Team uses across every surface, so the company sounds like it belongs to the industry it serves.
Go-to-market
The GTM programme is built from first principles: ICP definition, segmentation, messaging frameworks, funnel design and launch sequencing across labels, managers and artist teams.
Organic growth & content
We run the always-on organic engine: founder-led social, editorial, campaigns and community narrative that positions Team as a credible voice on modern music operations.
Paid media & performance
We plan and run paid across the channels that reach the industry, pairing performance discipline with brand-safe creative and feeding what we learn back into positioning and product.
Partnerships
We are building the partnership programme, developing relationships across the music ecosystem that give Team distribution, credibility and reach beyond what paid alone can buy.
Website & digital
We design and build the marketing site as both a brand statement and a conversion engine: modern, intelligent and operationally credible to anyone who has ever run a release.
Custom CRM & marketing systems
Off-the-shelf CRMs do not understand the music industry, so we are architecting a bespoke CRM and growth stack tailored to Team’s workflows: signal-driven outreach, a music-industry-aware data model and integrated marketing operations.
Embedded marketing leadership
Simon Lodge serves as Chief Marketing Officer, sitting in the executive team and leading marketing strategy and execution alongside the founders.
Where it stands
A new category is being defined and taken to market, a complete marketing function is owned end-to-end by Studio Nine, and custom platforms, from CRM to growth infrastructure, are being built alongside the product. The engine is live and compounding as Team scales.
“Studio Nine isn’t our agency. They’re our marketing team. They’re building the strategy, brand, website and growth engine we’re scaling on.”
— Founding team, Team