Music Supervisors: The Do’s and Don’ts of Sync and Pitching Music – #midem

L-R: Ricki Askin – Vice Media, Christoph Becker – Constantin Films AG, Kyle Hopkins – Microsoft Studios, Josh Rabinowitz – Grey Worldwide, Jessica Ibgui – Budde Music.

Key points:

Working in sync is all about perception

Josh: “It’s a sell – it’s how you’re perceived. In my business it’s mainly branding and advertising, so it’s all about perception. We’re trying to create this aura and make people think about something that in reality is not so sexy. In advertising it’s the way people perceive you. If you have a reputation in the business it helps your perception, if you come in confident it helps your perception. If you have a charisma it helps your perception.

The other part of perception is developing a trust. A lot of people are under pressure – things are happening quickly – the musical aspect is generally the 11th hour so you have to be able to go in there and not be sweating and stressing. You’ve got to be confident and charismatic and positive about selling your idea – I think that’s the case for everyone in music.”

Musical requirements can be hard to articulate 

Josh: “People have problems deciding what they really want. They’ll give you a brief and everybody seems to be on the same page and then they’re like well that’s not actually what I meant.”

Ricki: “A lot of times people don’t know what they want so our job is to articulate that and pull that out of them. It’s really difficult to articulate music and feeling so we have to present them with a multitude of different options”

Understand with whom you’re talking to and when

Kyle: “You’re going to speak to different people differently at different points of the project, so understanding who you’re talking to at each point in the process is really important. The decisions that are going to be made at the beginning of a project are different to the decisions being made at the end of the project.”

Imposing your own vision is a delicate dance

Kyle: “The number one thing is you’ve got to deliver what has been requested in terms of the artistic vision. If you don’t do that you’re going to erode the trust that you’ve built with your client. Even if you think there are alternatives that need to be considered, you’ve got to take care of the fundamentals before you present additional options. My colleague Maya Halfon and I will put together a small selection of tunes that we really believe in at the end of the pitching process if we think they might have been overlooked early on.”

Josh: “It’s all about taste. I have a playlist of about 40 songs – I bet we all do – that I think is like the best shit out there that I’ve collected over the years. I’ve been doing this for about 20 years and I’ve only been able to sell 1 through from that list in that time. It kind of blows but you may think a track is great but it’s not necessarily going to work in an execution.”

Ricki: “There’s a lot of collaborators in a project. You have to make sure that you’re answering the brief, but also giving a few things outside the box in the hope that they might be receptive to it. A lot of the time they don’t go for the stuff that you would hope and that’s just part of the business – adapting to visions that you don’t necessarily agree with. I’m constantly trying to edge my way in but also not take away from the importance of the content.”

Time is a luxury when it comes to clearance

Kyle: “It’s super rewarding to find that last writer and really dig into that Sherlock Holmes-esque style of supervision, but that’s only an option when you have the luxury of time. Budgets, time and clearance are all taken into consideration and help to inspire and inform the music selection – it comes back to trust and building a rapport with your clients. One of the worst things you can do is put a bunch of music in front of your clients that they fall in love with and then you can’t deliver on them – that’s a real relationship killer.”

Josh: “A lot of the challenge in advertising is to find out who the talent is on a track. Much of what we do is under the jurisdiction of the Screen Actors Guild in the US so if a song is recorded union at some point in history through a record label you expect that the label is going to have a listing of all the talent that played on each track and surprisingly they don’t always.

If you’re licensing a really famous song from the 80s and you’re spending a shitload of money on that license, you do have to pay the people that sang on it. So if there’s not a list and we can’t find out who sang on it we have to put aside money so that if they rear their heads we can pay them – this happens a lot in my world. It’s very challenging.”

Christoph: “It can be frustrating but sometimes it can be great. We just had a very obscure track that was almost impossible to license but at the end we managed to find people some way to sort it out. They didn’t even know themselves that they owned the rights!”

Ricki: “It comes down to using sources that you trust where you know that there isn’t going to be an un-cleared sample.”

There’s a number of ways to get your tracks to music supervisors

Kyle: “As an artist you should align yourself with a record label or publisher that has an established sync arm. If you’re doing that stuff yourself, find those sync agents who are operating in an arena that is well-matched for your music.”

Ricki: “Find a sync agent that believes in your stuff and doesn’t take on everyone – the larger the roster the more likely it is that you’ll get lost. They make money if you make money. I could only name 5 that I work with regularly. Find one that understands where your music could fit.”

Christoph: “It might be more helpful to play a great show somewhere than to have a sync agent – be an act that is visible. There are many different types of approaches.”

Josh: “I rely on my network of people – my children, my students at university, my team, Facebook – it’s your network that helps you discover new music.”

Music supervisors do want to work with new people

Ricki: “I would say the ratio of people I work with from existing relationships to new is around 60:40. You constantly need new stuff and I’m always looking for new stuff in different countries. I always listen to music I get from conferences – I think that’s the least we can do. Being at Midem is definitely a good way to get in front of people.”

Kyle: “On projects where you’re really time challenged you can’t take a risk on unknowns. But on longer form projects there’s a lot of opportunity and appetite to infuse our projects with new music and new partners. You’d be surprise how many tunes I successfully pitch and place that are based on cold calls.”

Music supervisors don’t necessarily have the last say

Kyle: “There’s a lot of decision makers in any music placement – even down to the rights holders and whether they agree to the terms and the budget. It’s a very collaborative process – we’re working with copywriters, creative directors, etc. to place the right tune for the right moment, but at the end of the day it’s not just our decision. The creative directors have a lot of weight in all of my interactions. Ultimately there’s always an executive with enough clout and stature to pull the plug.”

Josh: “They’re (the executives) the ones paying the bill. We might have strong vision but it’s up to them ultimately.”

Watch the panel in full here: