Sports content moves fast. An NBA franchise produces a constant stream of material across social media, in-stadium experiences, regional broadcasts, and community storytelling, often with tight turnarounds and a wide range of emotional registers to cover. The music has to keep up with all of it, and a generic stock library often can’t. The Portland Trail Blazers have been using Marmoset’s subscription licensing platform Track Club for over three years, and their experience offers a clear picture of what a music platform built for this kind of demand looks like in practice.
Marmoset Director of Creator Partnerships Eric Nordby, a lifelong Trail Blazers and Portland NBA fan, initiated the relationship in 2021. The pitch was straightforward: real music from real artists, better search tools, and a platform designed for editorial teams who need to move quickly without sacrificing quality.
Going Sport Mode
One of the clearest lessons from working with a sports franchise is that no single sound covers everything. For the Blazers’ usage, the catalog needs to span hard-hitting hip hop and modern pop for hype and highlight content, cinematic and trailer-style music for marquee moments, lighter understated tracks for community-focused storytelling, upbeat local music for in-stadium hype-building, and something poppy or a little quirky for player features and Rip City Remix content. And that’s just the baseline for a major sports brand.
Track Club’s catalog is built for exactly this kind of breadth, and the search tools are designed to help editorial teams find what they need without a lengthy back-and-forth. The Similarity Search tool, curated playlists, and genre and mood filters let teams browse intuitively and arrive at the right track quickly. In three years, the Blazers’ nimble editorial team has operated almost entirely independently, streamlining their workflow for quick-turn edits.
Mixlab adds another layer of flexibility. Built directly into Track Club, MixLab is an in-browser song editor that lets users adjust individual stems of a track by muting stems, changing volume levels and modifying BPM, all without leaving the platform or opening a separate DAW. For editorial teams with fast-moving deadlines, the ability to fine-tune a song in the browser and move on is an important part of the workflow.
A Catalog Built for You
The relationship with the Blazers has shaped the Track Club catalog in real ways, which speaks to how Track Club considers the individual music needs of each client. When the Blazers team identified catalog gaps (a desire for more pop, harder hip hop, and a specific request for ball-handling sound effects and movement sound effects) Marmoset took action to fill them. The SFX catalog, added last year, was a direct response to feedback like this. The broader music catalog has also doubled in size, informed by what clients actually need.
Onboarding is worth mentioning too. Getting a large editorial team up and running on a new platform is often a difficult task, but Track Club’s interface is intuitive enough that a single training session was all it took. After that initial session, the Blazers’ team was self-sufficient, and has remained that way across three years of continuous use.
Sports Licensing, Handled
The sports context also comes with licensing considerations that Track Club is built to accommodate. A subscription for a franchise like the Blazers includes regional broadcast and streaming rights alongside the standard content license, a more expansive set of needs than a typical brand, and one that Track Club can meet without requiring separate one-off deals for each use case.
Artist royalties are part of the equation as well. Queue sheets need to be submitted so the musicians behind the catalog get paid, and Track Club works with clients to make that process manageable. The Blazers submit queue sheets consistently and share them with Marmoset, enabling the team to track usage on behalf of catalog artists. It’s a workflow that respects both the client’s operational reality and the artists whose work makes the platform worth using in the first place.
Why It Works
From Marmoset’s perspective, a partnership like this one demonstrates what Track Club makes possible for brands operating at scale: a deep, diverse catalog of music from real working artists, tools that let talented editorial teams work fast and independently, and a licensing structure flexible enough to cover the full range of a modern content operation.
There’s also something Track Club offers that goes beyond the platform itself. Ten percent of every subscription flows back into community nonprofit organizations, many of which are based in Portland. For brands that care about where their dollars go, that’s a meaningful differentiator, especially for a local team. The right music partner can reflect your values and support the community around you at the same time.