The NBA has a highly engaged social following reaching 1.6 billion fans across all of its different channels. They have incredible premium content with highlights and promotional materials being posted all day and night. Until this partnership, however, music for NBA content was either sourced from top artists or stock produced. Our brief was to take this massive promotional surface and leverage its full potential.

UnitedMasters, an independent music distributor working with over 35,000 artists, saw in this social content an opportunity to insert great music by real emerging music talent and introduce the NBA as a new source of music discovery for all of its fans around the world. Essentially positioning the league as the new FM radio.

The partnership is made possible by tapping into the rapidly expanding global community of independent artists to provide music in exchange for massive promotional value. UnitedMasters is harnessing this community and establishing a frictionless pipeline to the NBA’s social surfaces.

In January 2019 UnitedMasters built a proprietary Sync Portal through which its A&R team can share music with the NBA and all 30 of its teams, the WNBA, NBA 2K League and NBA G League teams, and their international divisions. Every artist who distributes music through the UnitedMasters platform has the opportunity to submit their music for consideration. As artists opt in, UnitedMasters vets their track for brand safety, brand fit, rights and clearances, and audio quality. With all criteria met, the track is then made available through the Portal for usage across the NBA ecosystem. When the NBA downloads and places a track in its content, a chyron is embedded showing the artist and track name, and the description features the artist tag and a link to their featured track. The artist then re-posts the NBA’s content, creating a virtuous cycle.

So far we have had:

• Submissions of more than 2,000 tracks from more than 1,000 artists

• 200+ track placements in NBA content across platforms

• Engagement lifts on NBA posts featuring UnitedMasters artists of up to 400% versus comparable posts on the same day

• Streaming boosts for featured tracks of up to 6,000% (not a typo)