TONO's administration in Greenland employs 64 employees.
Here you will meet four of us.
TONO's administration in Greenland employs 64 employees.
Here you will meet four of us.
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Photo: Caroline Roka
– I have been employed in TONO's marketing department for eight years. In recent years, I have been responsible for following up on the festival, event and concert area and act as an operational link between the group's employees and the marketing director. In addition to responsibility for my own customer portfolio, the position entails responsibility for the division of labor, the implementation of activities and ensuring that the group's budget goals are met. The team's task is to sell the organizers the permission they need for their music use. This may be based on an inquiry from the organizer themselves, or that we contact those who have forgotten to contact us in advance of the event. We then follow up to ensure that figures for ticket sales and set lists are actually reported, so that we can settle the accounts with the authors. In addition to this, I participate in TONO's negotiation work, and in the planning and design of various marketing initiatives.
I have a hectic and exciting job, not least because the festival and concert industry has experienced a great boom in recent years. Everyday life is never boring, and a high level of activity has resulted in very good income growth. You come into contact with a varied group of organizers that includes everything from established, professional concert organizers to happy amateurs starting a festival for the first time.
One of our biggest challenges is that hobby organizers typically do not take the TONO fee into account when setting up their budget. Fortunately, most organizers see the benefit of a good dialogue with TONO. Negative feedback is usually turned around by us explaining what TONO is and does, especially when we explain what the fee is in practice – salaries to composers, songwriters and lyricists.
– I joined TONO one year after finishing my economics studies in Avberystwyth, Wales, and in other words, I have spent practically my entire working life at TONO. In the beginning, I worked in TONO's marketing department with permits for background music in shops and restaurants, hotels and discos.
Since 2000, I have been working in the online area, which has been groundbreaking work to a large extent. In many cases, the tasks have been related to new ways of using music, and we have seen good ideas that have never been translated into commercial services, and ambitious launches of what appear to be less obvious successes. For example, it was strange to see that the most profitable digital music distribution in the early 2000s was mobile ringtones. Consumers were happy to pay 20-30 kroner for a single-note version of a small excerpt of a song, while refusing to pay 8 kroner for a full download of the entire song.
The launch of Spotify and WIMP about 10 years ago was important for our department. The launches came after many years of negotiations with players with similar ideas. My somewhat naive starting point when I started with online licensing was that this would quickly enter into orderly and standardized forms, and that the entire online area would eventually be brought “back” into the marketing department’s general licensing work. At the time, it wasn’t, and it’s not completely streamlined yet.
Instead, the convergence in the media field has made it natural to link broadcast licensing with the work of the online department.
My goal when representing TONO to a new player in the Norwegian market has been to make it possible. If new ideas and concepts involving music can be converted into commercial services, and those behind them make money, then the songwriters also make money. A low threshold for getting started, combined with a tidy share of the income when these manifest, is in other words a good solution for both entrepreneurs and songwriters.
– In addition to being part of the member service on-call arrangement, which involves answering inquiries by phone and email on set days, I am TONO's contact person when it comes to operational matters with ICE, the company that makes up TONO's works documentation system. I am an intermediary between TONO and ICE, and with Polaris, TONO's cooperation with the Danish and Finnish companies on ICE-related issues. This is particularly about making sure that ICE delivers according to our Service Level Agreement, that TONO delivers estimated data volume to ICE so that the costs associated with being a customer of ICE are as expected, and discussing and solving specific operational challenges.
I also have a key account role within concerts, which involves actively securing overviews of members' concerts to be a driving force when it comes to their reporting of concerts. I am also part of a Polaris group consisting of one representative from each of the Polaris companies. We visit our sister societies to obtain information about the various companies' operations in order to increase income from abroad for our members.
I have been at TONO for a long time, but our business is constantly evolving, and I am constantly developing myself in new challenges. Right now, the work in the Polaris Group is particularly exciting. This is something completely new, and requires expertise from all parts of TONO and its sister societies' operations.
– I have worked in the same department since I started at the company eight years ago. I have mainly worked with TV reporting and some quality control in the concert area. The TV area has had an exciting development in recent years with a large increase in data, partly due to the fact that new TV channels are constantly being added. There are constant challenges in how we will handle this new, complex and large amount of information. We meet this, among other things, through major IT development projects, in which I have been involved. Here we collaborate with the other Polaris companies, Danish Koda and Finnish Teosto, to further develop and streamline systems and processes.
Among the tasks that engage me most at work at the moment is my participation in the Polaris Future Lab. Here, together with Koda and Teosto, we work to define how we can equip our companies for future challenges in the market, with a particular focus on technological development. The key words are new, flexible and forward-looking solutions, but we also work to be a contributor and flexible partner for businesses that want to disseminate music, and in this way secure income back to our members.
In an industry that is constantly facing new challenges, I greatly appreciate being involved in how TONO can solve them. I also get to participate in this through my role as the employee representative on TONO's board, where I have the opportunity to follow and participate in the discussions and work that is being done there.
