Sync portal

What it is

The sync portal is one place to run sync placements. An organisation: a sync agency, label, publisher or management company. Runs them across all the artists it works with; an artist team runs its own briefs on the same board. Every brief or opportunity (a film scene, a TV episode, an ad campaign, a game trailer) becomes a card on a pipeline board that moves from first contact to placement, with the tracks you pitched, the money booked and everything that happened along the way.

Using it

• Add an opportunity. From your organisation's Opportunities page, click New opportunity and fill in the brief: title, media type (film, TV series, advertising, trailer, video game…), the company or music supervisor, an optional fee estimate and pitch deadline, and which of your artists it's for.
• Or add an A&R brief. Pick the A&R briefs type in the create dialog for a label or publisher brief looking for songs to cut. Instead of a media type, a brief carries what's being asked for: genres, a BPM range and a reference link, shown as chips on the card. On a briefs-filtered board the stages read New → Pitched → Negotiating → Signed → Released (or Passed); everything else, pitching tracks, activities, money, works the same as a sync deal.
• Work the pipeline. Drag cards across the stages, New → Pitched → Negotiating → Licensed → Placed (or Lost). You can also reorder cards within a stage to prioritise. Use the search box and the media-type and artist filters to narrow the board. Each column header carries the stage's colour and count, and a + appears on hover that opens the create dialog already set to that stage.
• Start from a lead. A lead on your CRM pipeline (organisation or team scope) has a Create opportunity button: it spawns a card on this board with the company, primary contact, source and value estimate carried across, linked back to the lead (lead_id).
• Placing creates the licence. When a card enters Licensed or Placed, every approved pitched track automatically gets a licence record in the licensing CRM (rights_deals, record_kind = license) carrying the counterparty, term, territory, fee and contract. One licence per (opportunity, track): bouncing back to Negotiating and re-placing never duplicates.
• Pitch tracks. Open a card and add tracks from any artist team linked to your organisation. Each pitched track gets its own status. Pitched, shortlisted, approved or rejected, so you always know which song is in the running.
• See what can actually be cleared. Every pitched track carries a clearance badge, Ready to clear, Slow to clear or Can't clear, worked out from the song's own metadata: whether collaborator splits are confirmed and add up to 100%, whether it's marked one-stop, whether there's an instrumental version, an ISRC and a licensing contact. Open the badge for the list of what's still outstanding, so a song is fixed before a supervisor asks rather than after.
• Keep the history. Log notes (calls, emails, meetings) on each opportunity; stage changes and pitches are recorded automatically in the activity log.
• Track license terms. Once a deal is licensed or placed, record the license window (a month, a year, until 2030, or in perpetuity), the territory, and upload the signed contract (PDF/doc): it opens securely from the deal and the artist team can read it too. The Placements view lists every done deal sorted by soonest expiry, with statuses like Active, Expiring soon (within 60 days), Expired and Perpetual, so renewals never slip.
• Teams run their own sync board. An artist team's Sync page has two tabs. Our pipeline is the team's own board. The same kanban, filters, create dialog, deal sheet and placements view the org side uses, where the team creates its own briefs and pitches its own tracks. Run by organisations lists, read-only, the deals a label, publisher or agency is running for them: license window, territory, air date, which of their tracks made it, the signed contract, and which organisation manages it. Internal pipeline details of those org deals (fees, notes, other artists' pitches) stay private to the organisation.
• Book the money on the deal. A deal's sheet has a Money section: book the licence fee as income, the agent commission or clearance cost as an expense, and see the net. Each line is a normal financial entry. It counts in the team's or the organisation's books like any other. It just also points at the deal. Unlinking leaves the money where it is.
• Work with people who aren't on Aden yet. An opportunity can be for an external artist (just type their name), the counterparty can be a company that isn't on Aden (free text) or an Aden organisation you pick from the directory, and you can pitch external tracks by title, artist and link. Everything off-platform is marked Off Aden: when the artist joins (or you add them as a team), link the real team and tracks and the deal history carries over.